Ali Shaw Quotes & Sayings

After a long while he sat upright with great effort, exhaled a sigh and reached for a clean sheet of lined paper, smoothing it out on the desk. He unscrewed the lid of his fountain pen, laid it perpendicular to his paper, and began to write. Often he compared his writing to white water. He had only to leap in to be dragged away on its rapids, thrown this way and that with his own will rendered impotent. While writing he found the words came from the muscles in his hands, the feel of the shaft of his pen, the locked joint of his elbow. the scratching noise of the nib marking paper and, underneath all that, some coordinating impulse in his guts. Certainly not from his mind. — Ali Shaw

She dwelled for a moment on a memory from girlhood: smearing her tummy with a spiral of glue, then tipping a whole pot of opal across it. — Ali Shaw

Was she horrid to you? I hate her if she was horrid. — Ali Shaw

The woods felt like a sleeping monster worth tiptoeing past. — Ali Shaw

The winds shook off in unison and yipped beneath the gleaming stars.
She gave him her lips. They kissed.
And she was in love with the thunder. — Ali Shaw

His father looked wistful. 'And you don't feel anticlimatic?'
What's that?'
Somewhat the opposite of elated.'
What's elated again?'
Good feelings. That is to say, very good. You can feel, can't you? That's what I'm driving at. You don't ever wonder ... where feeling went? — Ali Shaw

It had butterfly wings, like flakes of patterned wax. Under the wings it had a hairy body with tiny horns. Its fur looked very dry in the hot summer rays. It had an ox's head, no bigger than her thumbnail, with a pink muzzle drawn into a grimace. A white splodge between its nostrils. The impossible detail of a scar on its bottom lip. There was warmth and a heartbeat in its body like that of a newborn chick. — Ali Shaw

Her toes were pure glass. Smooth, clear, shining glass. Glinting crescents of light edged each toenail and each crease between the joints of each digit. Seen through her toes, the silver spots on the bed sheet diffused into metallic vapours. — Ali Shaw

It didn't take tragedy or war to derail a man. It took only a memory. — Ali Shaw

The sunset like a blacksmith, was beating the sky into glowing red blades. — Ali Shaw

Perhaps you think too hard about what words you're going to use and how to make your mouth say them. — Ali Shaw

Writing is like going underwater - thank you for being there when I come back up. — Ali Shaw

It's survival of the fittest, not the strongest or the biggest. — Ali Shaw

One day, I learned that a single look can change everything. And since then I have seen it countless times. I have grappled to understand it and failed. For instance, all it took was a look from another man for my wife to fall out of love with me. It baffles me that a simple alignment of eyes can cause so much devastation. — Ali Shaw

One of the terrifying things about my life is that it belongs to me. It has never been lived before, nor will it ever be again. Every second is a brand-new possession. — Ali Shaw

She had felt a collision with him and known that she had wanted this her whole life: to crash for just one moment into another person at such a velocity as to fuse with him. — Ali Shaw

Carefully, he reached around her with both arms so his fingers locked across her back.
'You have to squeeze,' she whispered, 'or it's not a hug. — Ali Shaw

He imagined dying and being cut open and there were all his bones and muscles and his bared arteries and capillaries leading to a cavity in his chest where instead of a heart he had his camera. — Ali Shaw

A girl sat neatly on a flat rock. Somehow he'd not seen her. She looked like she'd stepped through the screen of a 1950s movie. Her skin and blond hair were such pale shades they looked monochrome. Her long coat was tied at the waist by a fabric belt. She was probably a few years younger than him, in her early twenties, wearing a white hat with matching gloves. "Sorry," she said, "If I surprised you." Her irises were titanium gray, her most striking feature. Her lips were an afterthought and her cheekbones flat. But her eyes ... He realized he was staring into them and quickly looked away. — Ali Shaw

Sometimes Midas suspected that life was a film with subliminal messages. Things would move along with an acceptable degree of predictability, then be punctuated by some horrible childhood memory. — Ali Shaw

She guiltily found she didn't miss him as much as she missed company in general. — Ali Shaw

I should take a photo.'
'No. Just remember it, and us in it. — Ali Shaw

It was just her and Midas in here, tucked away from the world. Here she could turn quietly into glass, with only love to distract her. — Ali Shaw

In a flash of anger, Midas grabbed a sod of earth and hurled it at the water, which broke into a hundred chained circles. Picturing Ida like the body in the bog made his heart seem to wilt and blow away. His face screwed through expressions. — Ali Shaw

The first time she'd lured her ex to a restaurant it had been all she could do to snap him out of the reverie he entered, only for him to emerge spouting nonsense about how she was a princess, a goddess, even a fucking mermaid one time he called her. — Ali Shaw

Beeches stood aghast in pools of shed leaves. Silver poplars looked like moonbeams. — Ali Shaw

Dust particles panicked and swarmed in the light. — Ali Shaw

Memories were just photos printed on synapses. — Ali Shaw

She sometimes wished she possessed the flawed kind of taste that drew girls to arseholes who wanted that one thing alone. — Ali Shaw

Then there were the negatives. How he missed negatives. They were the actual rays of light, bounced straight off a landscape, an object, a person, and scarred on to the film. Photographic negatives were the hardest evidence you could get of your memories. They were the char left by the fire, the bruise left on your skin. The same light that carried to your eyes, on the day of your photograph, that image of your mother, or your father, or your close friend, had recorded itself on the film. And now, staring at the photo on the wall of Ida's transparent toes against the bed sheets, he thought how similar her feet were to negatives: both subjects of that half-world between memory and the present. These were not real, flexible, treading toes, but a play of light that showed where toes had been. — Ali Shaw

Sometimes someone else's life can be the only thing that makes sense of your own. — Ali Shaw

Among the many fox magics her sobo had delighted in describing, the one that had most captured her imagination was the power to alter form. The most eldritch among foxes could turn (or so her grandmother would claim in that musical croak that was her storytelling voice) into human beings. The they would creep into the lives of lonely and impressionable souls and offer them long-sought affection. — Ali Shaw

Light didn't conduct truth as once he'd thought. There was nothing you could do to preserve truth. Light was only of use as a metaphor for the ungraspable moment. — Ali Shaw

Today's gloom was just such an exquisite affair. He reclined in it as other men might in a hot bath. There was a darkness such as this inside of him too, which this one helped appease. It made him feel undone out of his skin, so that it was hard to tell where Daniel Fossiter ended and the world began. In this way he felt released, an uncorked genie floating for a few precious moments beyond his lamp. — Ali Shaw

Besides, he didn't have enough intact heartstrings to hand them to people to pull. — Ali Shaw

The sky was something she'd so often dreamed of while the hoo-ha of the Sunday service carried on around her. There seemed to her infinitely more God to be found by staring up at the never-ending universe than by looking glumly around a building of bricks and stone. — Ali Shaw

He'd been an odd one, that boy with the camera. Such a distinctive physique: pale skin so taut on his skeleton, holding himself with a shy hunch, not ugly as such but certainly not handsome, with a demeanor eager to cause no trouble, to attract no attention. — Ali Shaw

As if you could terminate love abruptly because the one you loved signed papers with someone else in a church. — Ali Shaw

He said human beings were like a wind blowing. He said that sometimes we're loud and sometimes we're a whisper, sometimes we're warm and sometimes we're frighteningly cold. But however we blow, we blow onwards, and leave no sign of us behind. — Ali Shaw

Have you ever hoped for something? And held out for it against all the odds? Until everything you did was ridiculous? — Ali Shaw

It was the touch that made him realize he loved her. Warmth from her scalp. Grease from her locks. He entwined his hand in her hair. It shrank through his moving fingers like sand. They lay together for a long time. Somewhere outside, a dog barked. He could barely believe he had lived so long without wanting to touch. Photography had made him forget the necessity of this feeling. — Ali Shaw

Sometimes I just can't stop thinking enough to turn off. — Ali Shaw