Glenda Millard

“... I'll tell her about Tia. I'll tell her how beautiful she was and how brave. And I'll tell her the most important thing of all: that her mother loved her better than her life.”

“The wheels hummed lullabies on the liquorice road ...”

“... we sat back and let the moon shine itself all over her, and we saw that Tia was full of light. Billy said that when we die the darkness leaves us.'We're pure and perfect then,' he said, 'the way we are when we're born.”

“Through the night we drove in a tangle of waking and sleeping, nightmares from hell and holy white dreams.”

“I didn't know what to say when someone's given you a small free kiss in the dark ...”

“I don't make promises in case I can't keep them. Sometimes you can't help it; things stop you.”

“You don't tell anyone things like that about your friends, even when you're mad at them.”

“I looked at her moonskin face her pansy eyes and her cobweb hair and I knew I would go on giving her one last chance for ever.”

“I wasn't going to let things happen to me any more. I was going to make them happen.”

“I know that sentence is long and has too many joining words in it but sometimes, when I'm angry, words burst out of me like a shout, or, if I'm sad, they spill out of me like tears, and if I'm happy my words are like a song. If that happens it's one of my rules not to change them because they're coming out of my heart and not my head, and that's the way they're meant to be.”

“Sometimes it's better to live without a mother than not to live at all.”

“Then I kissed Max because I loved him, and everyone I had ever loved before had gone away and I had never kissed them goodbye.”

“I saw pearls in her mouth and the velvet cushion of her tongue and I heard the magic words come out of her.”

“I couldn't remember anyone hugging me like that before.”

“She reminded me of the sea; the way she came dancing towards you, wild and beautiful, and just when she was almost close enough to touch she'd rush away again.”

“Maybe if the empty space inside her was filled with love there'd be no room for sad and dark things.”

“Some people, like my dad, have invisible scars; others, like Tia, have scars you can see.”

“Sometimes words come out of me and I don't know where they come from or why. They're like falling stars tumbling through the universe; bright, burning things that can't be stopped.”

“The girl danced like light on water. After I'd watched for a while I looked with all of me, not just my eyes, and then I saw the meaning of the dance. I wanted to stop looking because it was so sad, but I couldn't because it was so beautiful.”

“You might think what I tell you next is all a dream, or that I've imagined it. I can't help it if that's what you think, but I swear it's true. Sometimes the truest things are the hardest to believe.”

“... and all we knew about her that we didn't know the night before was that she had eyes like pansies and skin like the moon.”

“I never had anything before this all started. I've lived in No-Man's-Land for thirty years.”

“We walked back the way we came, and even though it was dark there were no lights burning inside the houses. They were like people without hearts; raspberry tarts without the jam.”

“Wars come and wars go,' he said. 'Things change, but the carousel is always here. It reminds people of the good times.”

“I didn't understand right away what she meant. But her words soaked through my skull like warm oil, behind my eyes, down my spine and into the empty space inside me.”

“It's like waking up and finding there's a war on. Nothing's the way it used to be and it's difficult to get your balance. That's why I held Billy's hand.”

“Sometimes I can see colour without opening my eyes. I saw that Billy's heart was no colour and every colour. Like water or diamonds or crystals, it's pure and reflects the light.”

“He was like a shattered stained-glass window: something beautiful that's broken; a million colours fallen on the ground where no light can get through.”

“But saying stuff, even if it's good, isn't enough. Dad never did anything, he just talked about it. Even I knew you needed plans.”

“Running away was easy; not knowing what to do next was the hard part.”

“I couldn't tell what colour her eyes were. They were wet and dark and shining, like pools of deep, still water. For a second I thought I could see pictures in them, like I was looking right inside her to where her memories were. She smiled, and I wondered if she knew what I'd seen or if she could see the pictures I kept hidden inside myself.”

“When the doors closed behind me I felt like a bird had got inside my chest and was beating its wings trying to get loose, and it wasn't leaving much room for me to breathe.”