The worst part of Christmas is that it... - Matthew Crow - Quotes.Pub

The worst part of Christmas is that it ends. That practically the day after, everyone carries on as if nothing else ever happens. You’re expected to go back to your normal life, eat normal food, not receive presents or celebrate or be jolly and wear stupid clothing, just because the moment’s passed.

Matthew Crow Quotes

We had no plan. No final destination in mind. We just drove faster and faster until we arrived. And when we did, all I could think of was how much fun it had been getting there.

A box of chocolates is the wrapped equivalent of a shrug. You may as well not bother.

Mum just laughed gleefully at his mounting frustration, like the villainous matriarch in a Roald Dahl story. I suspect a TV guide would describe her idea of comedy as ‘dark’, or, at very best, ‘alternative’.

At their time of life they should be wearing trouser suits and baking cakes, maybe spending their days penning hand-written letters of complaint to newspapers. Not drinking alcopops with crude straws in them.

The snow was practically gone by the next morning. It was as though it had arranged a suicide pact with Christmas itself. Patches of street began to poke through the white, like mold on bread. By the first week of the New Year everything looked like it always had, only wetter and sadder, like yesterday’s packed lunch.

He had to be nice to me at the moment because he had to be surrounded by people. This was because boys like him were, essentially, pasta. Everyone thought they loved him because they had never been forced to experience the true blandness of him on his own.

Nothing’s ever all bad if you think hard enough about it.

Grandma’s house had the atmosphere of a Tupperware box left out in the sun. Like a tropical flower, she had to be kept warm and moist at all times, or she would wilt and die.

I don’t think the pain of a broken heart is one I will survive,” I said, lying across the upstairs landing so that everybody would notice my plight.

Some loves, like the one Mum felt for Dad, disappear forever and are best forgotten about; some are best suspended in the amber of memory – localized to a specific time and place, like a really great dish you ate at a restaurant on holiday; and other loves carry on forever, no matter how distant their nucleus becomes.

But mum was tough. No matter how fancily she dressed, she couldn’t hide her true nature. Everyone at school was scared of her. Especially the other mums. She once knocked out a man with a single punch when he barged her trolley in Sainsbury’s.

Real life is – quieter, more understated. No one is backlot and nothing has a soundtrack and no one has someone cleverer than them writing their lines. And so they just say nothing and get on with it. More’s the pity, if you ask me, I quite like the idea of my own soundtrack.

We didn’t waste one second of that day. We talked about the past. We talked about the future. And we danced. And we sang. And we toasted absent friends, as the stars shone through the night sky, like Amber’s last gift.

Amber was designed for life. She was designed for color and movement. She was not a girl born for the click of the camera’s lens. No device could capture her, the way she was, the way she was meant to be. She was not born to be still or stationary. Without her color she was broken, a faulty image that could never be fixed. Without her voice she was nothing. Amber was gone. At that moment it was all clear to me. Everything to come was just a formality.

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