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Quotes from Border Crossing — Pat Barker

born 1943 England

← All quotes by Pat Barker

21 quotes

You wring a chicken's neck, you don't expect to find it running round the yard next morning, do you?

Border Crossing (2001)

But sir, certainly, there isn't any proof as to my guilt...

Border Crossing (2001)

The man needs to learn how to controll his anger, he is crossing a border here, and he has no right

Border Crossing (2001)

Do you think it's different, killing a rabbit and killing a person?

Border Crossing (2001)

A second later, the water enclosed him in a coffin of ice.

Border Crossing (2001)

Do you think confession's the only route to redemption?

Border Crossing (2001)

I thought he was one of the most dangerous boys we've ever had through the school.

Border Crossing (2001)

The forensic evidence for Danny's guilt was overwhelming, but he was a good liar.

Border Crossing (2001)

But [Tom] was used to switching off, to living his life in separate compartments.

Border Crossing (2001)

It was extraordinarily distracting: this feeling of a pivotal moment in his own life being played out in front of an uninvited audience.

Border Crossing (2001)

I don't know why I killed her, I didn't know then and I don't know now. And I don't know how to live with it.

Border Crossing (2001)

Danny was a bottomless pit. He wanted other people to fill him, only in the process the other people ended up drained.

Border Crossing (2001)

They'd awoken that morning to a curious stillness. Clouds sagged over the river, and there was mist like sweat over the mudflats.

Border Crossing (2001)

The fired burnt furiously, piled high with logs. Danny had dragged the log basket onto the hearth rug and was kneeling beside it, a log in each hand, watching the fire burn.

Border Crossing (2001)

The boy [Danny] looked like a baby: purple faced, wet hair, that drowned look of a newborn, cast up on to its mother's suddenly creased and spongy belly.

Border Crossing (2001)

...the horror of the images impossible to connect with the child he'd just left.

Border Crossing (2001)

When we got married, you didn't even want kids. It was... you and me.

Border Crossing (2001)

...he'd seen the boy's [Danny's] body hang suspended... an umbilical cord of silver bubbles linking his slack mouth to the air.

Border Crossing (2001)

A rasp and flare as [Danny] struck the match. A doubled reflection of the flame appeared in his eyes, whose pupils had not contracted, as one would have expected, but grown large, as if starved for light.

Border Crossing (2001)

[Tom had] learnt to value detachment: the clinician's splinter of ice in the heart.

Border Crossing (2001)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Pat Barker (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.