Quotes from book

Never Let Me Go

“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. That's how it is with us. It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever.”

“You say you’re? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?”

“What I'm not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time.”

“I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.”

“Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?”

“It was like being given a maths problem when your brain's exhausted, and you know there's some far-off solution, but you can't work up the energy even to give it a go. Something in me just gave up.”

“It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.”

“She always wanted to believe in things.”

“A part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and-no matter how much we despised ourselves for it-unable quite to let each other go.”

“You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.”

“All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.”

“It was like there was some parallel universe we all vanished off to where we had all this sex.”

“And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it's probably because I'm looking at them in the light of what came later…”

“And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind of world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.”

“We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time.”

“The problem, as I see it, is that you've been told and not told. You've been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way.”

“Your life must now run the course that's been set for it.”

“Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory…”

“Even the solitude, I've actually grown to quite like… I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the next couple of hours I'll have only the roads, the big gray sky and my daydreams for company.”