Julia Green

“You're not really in control, not with this falling-for-people stuff. You don't plan who you're going to fall in love with. It's all random - chance accidents of time and place.”

“Some things get lost others return. That is how it is: the way of things.”

“Change & transformation. That kind of magic.”

“It's funny isn't it, how everything's changing all time. Nothing stays still.”

“I don't believe in the white spectre-type of ghosts you get in stories, but what if ghosts are something else? Like memories somehow caught and trapped in time, released by being in certain places where things first happened.”

“Because that's what you do when something terrible happens. You go over and over every little thing, looking for clues, trying to find a pattern and a way to make sense out of the muddle and hurt.”

“There are lots of different ways grown-ups disappear. It's lonely being the one left behind.”

“Lying in their field above the sea, watching the sun go down and the darkness creep over the field so that they were wrapped together in shadow. Will propped himself on one elbow beside her, is finger curling strands of her dark hair until it was bound so tight it pulled her scalp and she cried out, and then he bent over her, kissed her, so,so tenderly, and she thought she would die with happiness. They had made love, the very first time.”

“We have to find our own way to live, and to love. Don't ever let anyone else tell you how it should be for you.”

“What i realise now is that the story actually did have a happy ending: the children came back. In spite of everything the adults did to them, the children found their own way home, their pockets full of precious stones and pearls that gleamed and shone in the light.”

“But you still need the two: the dark and the light. You can't see one without the other.”

“That's what memory is like: layers, one overlapping another, and compacting down the way old leaves slowly crumble and turn to a rich peaty soil, nourishing the new things that will grow. It's why it's important, remembering things. It's why it matters, when the memories aren't there, and no one fills in the gaps for you.”