Sarah Hall Quotes & Sayings

There were times when initial introductions were so vested with something other as to confuse and distract and entrance both parties, Cy would realize later. And only further into their relationships when you knew the person better, and their place in your life became clear, if there was love, if there was hate, if there was deepness of any kind, only then did you understand that the embers of meaning have been present all along and glowing since that first moment you laid eyes on them. As if you already knew them before you came to know them. As if some rift had bent time. — Sarah Hall

I have ideas. I hear voices. Words accumulate. It's still an overriding impulse. And I'm self-employed, which means I have to be sensible and motivated about paying the bills. — Sarah Hall

You are often asked to explain your work, as if the reader isn't able to work it out. And people always try and label you by your work. — Sarah Hall

Revisiting much-loved childhood novels is never easy. — Sarah Hall

For every prescriptive idea about the craft of fiction, there's at least one writer who makes a virtue of the contrary. — Sarah Hall

Freedom comes with responsibility; it comes with privilege and a conscience. It comes with difficult choices. We cannot stand by and allow the Authority to do what it is doing any more. We cannot wait for them to come and take apart what we've made. I will not allow it. You know me. I will not allow it. — Sarah Hall

My favourite pool is located in a remote valley in the eastern Lake District, surrounded by vine-hung cliffs and slippery boulders. It has a torrential sheet waterfall at one end and is almost black in colour, so it appears bottomless, a portal to nowhere. — Sarah Hall

The beauty of interdisciplinary conversation is that the mode of expression is essentially different for each practitioner, even if ideas are shared. — Sarah Hall

Over the coun-ter, she might let you mount-her, but in the morning, there'll be no more whoring, as its off to the doc-ter for warts of your cock-ter — Sarah Hall

The world can accommodate your situation, as it accommodates all situations. And your body will keep explaining to you how it all works, this original experiment, this lifelong gift. Your body will keep describing how, for the first time being at least, there is no escape from this particular vessel. These are your atoms. This is your consciousness. These are your experiences
your successes and mistakes. This is your first and final chance, your one and only biography. This is the existential container, the bowl of your life's soup, wherein something can be made sense of, wherein there is a cure, wherein you are. — Sarah Hall

Swimming in the U.K. is not really about enjoying a sultry experience. It's about cold, clear acts of purification, and constitutional durability. It's about invigoration and bravado. — Sarah Hall

You've been wondering lately when the moment is that somebody is truly lost to you. — Sarah Hall

In my early 20s, connecting with fiction was a difficult process. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to what was meaningful, what convinced, and what made sense. — Sarah Hall

I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first. — Sarah Hall

I think you can tell any human story in a particular place. — Sarah Hall

Lipstick never lasted long when they were together; he would always kiss her after she had applied it, as if he liked the smearing viscous sensation. Sometimes she felt sure it was discomposing her that he enjoyed. — Sarah Hall

You can't see all of a place until you look at it from a distance. — Sarah Hall

When I moved back to Cumbria, one of the first things I did was locate a decent bookshop. — Sarah Hall

A month in and it seemed to CY that he was an explorer summiting the foothill of an a bizarre and primitive island. — Sarah Hall

For about two years, while researching 'The Wolf Border,' I was a complete wolf bore. I would regurgitate everything I was researching, whether people were interested or not. — Sarah Hall

I don't think practitioners should necessarily be advertising their work. — Sarah Hall

Nightmares of a capital city overwhelmed by tsunami, war or plague transfix us, but catastrophe is first felt locally, and there are many homes outside the city. — Sarah Hall

I was the feral, mud-bathing, tree-climbing variety of child. Why would I want to read about pirates when I could build a raft and terrorise sheep along the riverbanks? — Sarah Hall

It's a lovely feeling, just working away at the desk, putting words down, building words up ... I think you have to be aware that what you're doing is not just a private act, it's a societal thing. — Sarah Hall

I write in the mornings or afternoons - I'm not a night owl and can write for only four or five hours maximum. — Sarah Hall

I lost the ability to fear and panic. Instead I felt practical and causal. I had never known time to pass so acutely before. I sat out through the night with the patrol, watching the bitter glow of stars overhead, listening as the season exhaled and the layers of vegetation shrugged and compressed, like the ashes of burnt wood. On the hills I was aware of every corporeal moment, every cycle of light. I felt every fibre of myself conveying energy, and I understood that it was finite, that the chances I had in life would not come again. — Sarah Hall

He told her the flowers in her painting contained exactly the purple substance of the flowers on the desk in front of her [ ... ] Let us open the window and see if your painting can entice the butterflies. — Sarah Hall

Those partial to drink were hiding faults and dishonesty. They were sloppy souls, even the ones with pleasant manners and fine noses. — Sarah Hall

Wonderful characters rotate around and through bookshops on a daily basis, competing with and possibly even triumphing over fiction when it comes to entertainment, strangeness and inspiration. — Sarah Hall

Show, don't tell, is a mantra repeated by tutors of creative writing courses the world over. As advice for amateurs, it is sound and helps avoid character profiling, unactivated scenes, and broken narrative frames. — Sarah Hall

I'm very aware of modern countryside issues, such as rewilding: how, as science progresses, we begin to understand that a healthy ecosystem is multiform. — Sarah Hall

We endorse the manmade competition between ourselves that disunites us, striping us of our true ability. We don't believe we can govern better, and until we believe this, we never will. It's time for a new society. — Sarah Hall

The truth of death is a peculiar thing. For when they leave us the beloved are as if they never were. They vanish from this earth and vanish from the air. What remains are moors and mountains, the solid world upon which we find ourselves, and in which we reign. We are the wolves. We are the lions. After so many nights treading the banks with the dogs and my brothers, intent on some mettlesome purpose I did not truly understand, night after night I dreamed of the river. I dream it now: a river of stolen perfumes, winding its way through our inverse Eden. — Sarah Hall

Art history became an A-level option at my school the year I started sixth form. This happened because another student and I cajoled and bullied the head of the art department into arranging it with the examination board. — Sarah Hall

There is always half a truth in cliche. — Sarah Hall

You didn't understand what he was saying, until he kissed you. It was a kiss of such complicity, of such uncomplicated sympathy, that you felt for the first time not alone in your suffering. — Sarah Hall

A lot of my literature deals with these people who are somehow magnetic because they have that ability to step over lines. — Sarah Hall

Dystopian novels, such as Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments. — Sarah Hall

Elliot Rawley was a drinker, Cy's mother had been right. And he was a poor drinker. One that let the demons of the bottle into his head when he tipped it back, demons that went about unloosing all the trouble they could find stashed in the catacombs of his mind. Every tragic thing that had ever happened, every self-doubt, every delusion, freed itself from bondage and revisited him when he drank. — Sarah Hall

There are stories told to him only at this time of year. Fantastic, magical stories, the old Hollier in the woods finding only three red berries, which peel back in the night to reveal gifts of frankincense, gold and myrrh, Christmas in hot deserts, dust-blown countries, the necklace of tears, and the story of the robin. — Sarah Hall

One thing I will say, they often take it better than a man. Pain, that is. Probably the residue of tolerance from when they were all bloody witches and got stoned or burned or drowned for it, eh lad? Never tell your mother I said that, by the way. — Sarah Hall

There are men who make the world seem populated by good men, those who are intuitive, or have been taught. — Sarah Hall

I used to dislike bookshops immensely as a child and was won over only later in life. — Sarah Hall

Of all the conditions we experience, solitude is perhaps the most misunderstood. — Sarah Hall

Short stories are often strong meat. Reading them, even listening to them, can be challenging, by which I do not mean hard work, simply that a certain amount of nerve and maturity is required. — Sarah Hall

I was brought up in the north of England, which is probably no rougher than anywhere else, but I remember as a child being kind of mesmerized by girls fighting on the playground. — Sarah Hall

Having judged a few competitions, it's clear that novelists are often the laziest short story writers. — Sarah Hall

You've found that there is something that can make you feel, and make you feel present: sex. Not the routine, dusk-and-dawn sex of a trusted, established relationship, but illicit, dangerous sex. Sex that is novel and leaves you sore; that is experienced in the gaps between your mundane, moral life; that is strange and breathless and addictive. — Sarah Hall

James Salter has talents on the page we novelists would sell souls to the devil for. — Sarah Hall

Let him join the men of the past. Her old lovers were ghosts. None of them had survived; none were missed. — Sarah Hall

I don't see that books can be written without political context - not if they're relevant and ambitious. — Sarah Hall

The show brought Claudia sadness finer than any requiem or any gravestone or anything beautiful or sorrowful that she could think of. On afternoons when she wasn't working with her husband or rotating on the platform in the Human Picture Gallery at Luna, she would go off by herself and pay her dime and linger in the corridors of the exhibit. — Sarah Hall

I was brought up in Cumbria where I saw all these fierce agricultural women. — Sarah Hall

People were made up of shit and piss and phlegm and bits and pieces of experience. — Sarah Hall

People went through life like well handled jugs, collecting chips and scrapes and stains from wear and tear, from holding and pouring life. — Sarah Hall

The man had added to his body in a way that was brave and timeless and beyond adornment. — Sarah Hall

I like extreme situations: people pushed out of their comfort zones; the civil veneer stripped off. — Sarah Hall

Personal effects: how irrelevant they are, how sad, how lost, how vagrant, without the force that gives them purpose. — Sarah Hall

It doesn't do to rely on those in charge completely. That's one thing the Yanks always got right. You've done a bit of history in school, haven't you? Well, now. Imagine if the National Guard had surrendered their arms, and the Germans had invaded after all. We'd have been fighting with broom handles and axes like hairy medievals while they ran over us with tanks. Your — Sarah Hall

Writing, and its theatre of operation, is better than working shifts packing frozen sausages; that's all I need to think about if I'm having difficulties. — Sarah Hall

Swimming in the cold and the dark of British autumn is not for the faint-hearted. — Sarah Hall

I am a feminist, although I always worry saying that because you then get people asking you about the 1970s. — Sarah Hall

There was a lot of fiction I did not enjoy, whose landscapes seemed bland and unevocative, the characters faint-hearted within them, the very words lacking vibrancy. — Sarah Hall

You think back and you ask yourself why you became so interested in wolves. I think it was because when I was very small, growing up in a little hamlet near Shap, we would go to Lowther Wildlife Park for birthday parties. Now closed, it was only three miles from my parents' house. — Sarah Hall

Daniel Woodrell has made a name as a master of prose with personality - a densely descriptive, gamey form of storytelling, one might say traditional storytelling - of late rather an unfashionable mode. — Sarah Hall

When you are a kid, a wolf is an amazing sight, so sumptuous. I sort of knew these were splendid creatures, that I was not going to find them outside roaming around. It was like a dog, but not a dog. It was incredible, a god! — Sarah Hall

I've always been interested in wolves, since I was a child. There was a wolf enclosure in a wildlife park very close to where I was brought up; they were the main attraction. — Sarah Hall

I can gabble on now, but I couldn't when I was a kid, so I spent a lot of time in my own head on the moors by myself. It felt like writing was the right way to express myself. — Sarah Hall

The short story is very good at looking at shadow psychologies and how the system breaks down underneath. — Sarah Hall

Apex predators are good for an environment in terms of biodiversity and trophic cascade - we have very few. But realistically, only a few areas could sustain free-roaming wolves in Britain, mostly in Scotland. — Sarah Hall

That boy may have been born on third base but he sure as shit ain't scored a triple. — Sarah Hall

Fear is a relative thing; its effects are relative to power. — Sarah Hall

Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form. — Sarah Hall

I don't reckon there are many writers who start out really expecting writing to be an attainable occupation. Well, I didn't. It was a pipe dream. — Sarah Hall

Prescient experts of biological codes. — Sarah Hall

She did not make monsters of us. She simply gave us the power to remake ourselves into those inviolable creatures the God of Equality had intended us to be. We knew she was deconstructing the old disabled versions of our sex, and that her ruthlessness was adopted because those constructs were built to endure. She broke down the walls that had kept us contained. There was a fresh red field on the other side, and in its rich soil were growing all the flowers of war that history never let us gather. It was beautiful to walk in. As beautiful as the fells that autumn. — Sarah Hall

I was useless at science. I was never going to be an astrophysicist. — Sarah Hall

My writing is called exotic or avant-garde because I write about rural places. Has it really come to this, that if you write about the country you are avant-garde? How did this happen? Modern agriculture and spaces are still so relevant. — Sarah Hall

I married an American. He was from the Pacific Northwest but went to law school in the South, so I was living in Virginia and North Carolina. — Sarah Hall

I said, it's strange, each time I see you again. You look different. Altered. You're not like I remember. I have to get used to you. — Sarah Hall

Over the years, I've lived in a variety of places, including America, but I was born and raised in the Lake District, in Cumbria. Growing up in that rural, sodden, mountainous county has shaped my brain, perhaps even my temperament. — Sarah Hall

It's taken me 15 years to feel I might be able to write and publish short stories, and for the assiduous checks of the industry to allow some through. — Sarah Hall

My work is of me; it's not me. I want it to be far more extraordinary than I am. — Sarah Hall

It's been noted that writing about the production of art is a masquerade or metaphor for writing about writing. This may be true, there are similarities - both the verbal and the visual represent the thing or the concept. — Sarah Hall

I don't like novels that tie everything up in a plot-y way. I always think that's not really true of life, particularly of people in power. — Sarah Hall

Red, brown, yellow, green, black. Five colours to say everything that could be said. And what Cy suddenly wanted, more than anything in the world just then, what he wanted was that missing blue, primary and resistant to the trade. Blue that was unstable and misbehaved when left in skin. Blue like the sea that had taken his father. Blue, for his mother's sake, and for the true colour of every bereaved and bloodless heart when it is collapsing. — Sarah Hall

It's very interesting to me that the nationalist movement in Scotland has become so positive and self-reflective rather than anti-English. The referendum in 2014 was peaceful, for all its deeply and passionately divided people. — Sarah Hall

In truth, she disliked books. She felt a peculiar disquiet when opening the pages. She had felt it since childhood. She did not know why. Something in the act itself, the immersion, the seclusion, was disturbing. Reading was an affirmation of being alone, of being separate, trapped. Books were like oubliettes. Her preference was for company, the tactile world, atoms. — Sarah Hall

Like a dog defeated in a frenzied circle by its own tail and slowing and realizing then that the tail it was after all along was already its possession — Sarah Hall

For its speculations to be taken seriously, dystopian fiction must be part of a discussion of contemporary society, a projection of ongoing political failures perhaps, or the wringing of present jeopardy for future disaster. — Sarah Hall

There's nothing like the vast, dark Atlantic to remind you of your mortality. But terror can also be exhilarating. — Sarah Hall

Our lives are politically wound. — Sarah Hall

Set in a nameless colonial country, in an unspecified era, Katie Kitamura's second novel tracks the fortunes of a landowning family during the first waves of civil unrest. — Sarah Hall

I felt impelled to write. It felt demonic, and I wanted to improve, the way some people habitually pick up a guitar and get better at playing it and making up songs. — Sarah Hall

This is your first and final chance, your one and only biography. — Sarah Hall

We all have our preferences - some people go for birds - but for me, there's just something about the wolf; the design of it is really aesthetically pleasing. — Sarah Hall

I was a terrible painter - my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso's demoiselles and the BBC test card clown. — Sarah Hall

Quite a lot is required of writers these days in terms of, if not promoting the work, then being a representative of the work. It's a difficult thing, really. — Sarah Hall

Writers cannot simply have a go, imagining it's easier to produce a story than a novel because fewer words are required. Have a go by all means; be intrepid, but be equipped. — Sarah Hall

One of the things I try to do with my writing is try to evoke the spirit of the place. I think these things imprint on the landscape and the culture. — Sarah Hall