Telling Tales quotes

🧪 Emotional dependence

"We lived for each other … for … a whole harmonious year"

🧪 Desperation

"She gripped my shoulders […] her face had the same quivery look of being about to spill over. She pulled me towards her."

🧪 Spaces

"I felt safe in his shed. The house where Ralph now lorded it, tucking into bigger and bigger meals, was a menacing place. The shed was another, a sealed-off world."

🧪 Appearance vs reality

"we'd take something that wasn't gold at all and cover it … so it looked as if it was all gold - but it wasn't."

🧪 Effects of conflict

"he looked like some torpid, captive animal”

🧪 Violence

"I didn't want to kill him. I wanted to spoil his face so Mother would no longer want him."

🧪 Moral ambiguity

"suicide can be murder"

🧪 Change

"Anything can change."

🐡 Context

"just a big trick"

🐡 Values

"A man of principle and honour."

🐡 Misunderstandings

"Father was just telling me how Watanabe was a man of principle."

"There are other things besides work."

🐡 Change

"Business these days has become so different. Dealing with foreigners."

🐡 Family tension

"My sister relaxed quite visibly once he had left the room."

🐡 Regret

"Perhaps I should have been a more attentive father."

🐡 Silence

"We fell silent once more, waiting for Kikuko to bring the tea.”

🐡 Understanding

"Obviously you don't see. You don't see how it is for some parents. Not only must they lose their children, they must lose them to things they don't understand."

👔 Identity

"I wear a uniform, blue overall and white cap with the school logo on it. Part-time catering staff, that's me, £3.89 per hour.”

👔 Irony

"Very keen on fairness, we are here."

👔 Hidden identity

"I am half-Polish. They don't know that here."

👔 Exclusion

"a knot of teachers"

👔 Metaphor

"a bird in a coal mine"

👔 Xenophobia

"It's hell for the kids … It's the way he talks."

👔 Symbol

"His red tie with its bold green squiggles was much too wide and much too bright. It was a flag from another country, a better country than the ones either of us lived in."

👔 Epiphany

"It went through me like a knife through butter. [...] I felt ... words in my mouth, words I didn't understand."

🎒 Isolation

"I stand in the middle of the room"

🎒 Authority

"The Inspector's eyes pierce me through. They demand a response, demand to be respected and obeyed."

🎒 Resistance

"The rebel inside me is alive."

🎒 Racism

"Is 'cause yu black and stupid why teacher meek yu sit a de back all de time"

🎒 Language

"here I was without a language to reply to her calls"

🎒 Reclaiming identity

"We discover heroes, rebels, guerrilla fighters. They help us assert our right to be."

🎒 Collective empowerment

"Voices are raised, claiming, proclaiming, learning the new language in dis here England."