Top 40 Bridget Collins Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If everything in your life was based on a lie, would you risk it all to tell the truth?”

— Bridget Collins

2. “Knowledge is always a kind of magic, I suppose.”

— Bridget Collins

3. “She has to be careful what she puts in it, doesn’t she. Everything turns so loud, once it’s there.”

— Bridget Collins

4. “We take memories and bind them. Whatever people can’t bear to remember. Whatever they can’t live with. We take those memories and put them where they can’t do any more harm. That’s all books are.’ Finally I met her eyes.”

— Bridget Collins

5. “We kissed as if we could stop the earth turning, as if we were enemies as well as lovers, as if we’d never see each other again.”

— Bridget Collins

6. “We make books – we make beautiful books – out of love.”

— Bridget Collins

7. “Which was worse? To feel nothing, or to grieve for something you no longer remembered? Surely when you forgot, you’d forget to be sad, or what was the point?”

— Bridget Collins

8. “Suddenly the summer silence seemed fragile; I didn’t want to let the rest of the world in, not for a split second.”

— Bridget Collins

9. “It is natural, after all. One generation fades as another matures. The old order gives way to the new. And so on.”

— Bridget Collins

10. “Memories,’ she said, at last. ‘Not people, Emmett. We take memories and bind them. Whatever people can’t bear to remember. Whatever they can’t live with. We take those memories and put them where they can’t do any harm. That’s all books are.”

— Bridget Collins

11. “Under everything is happiness so deep and rich it’s like dark wet earth. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know why it’s there. But I could reach out and grab a fistful of it.”

— Bridget Collins

12. “Six wasn’t offended by the same things other people were, she pointed out, so without that frame of reference it was a guessing game, and personally she didn’t feel it ought to be the main business of her life trying to work it out. Thaniel agreed.”

— Bridget Collins

13. “But the part of me that yearned for music and noise was the old, healthy part; I knew that silence, work and rest were what I needed now. Even if, sometimes, it felt so lonely I could hardly bear it.”

— Bridget Collins

14. “A rose petal so soft I can’t feel where it begins.”

— Bridget Collins

15. “Maybe I should have followed him; but somehow it went from too soon to too late, without the right moment in between.”

— Bridget Collins

16. “She has learnt the hard way to protect herself, to keep herself closed, never to give herself away.”

— Bridget Collins

17. “On the other side of us, under the setting sun, the marshes lay flat and endless: green speckled with bronze and brown, glinting with water. I could smell sodden grass and the day’s warmth evaporating. There was a rank moldering note under the scent of moisture, and the vast dying sky above us was paler than it should have been.”

— Bridget Collins

18. “I ran through air that held me back.”

— Bridget Collins

19. “How could she forget she’s a woman, and that he’d treat her like one?”

— Bridget Collins

20. “These are the times that scare her the most, the beginnings and endings: this is when the world is most unpredictable.”

— Bridget Collins

21. “A ray of red sunlight blazes over my shoulder, swift as a curtain being drawn back. Shadows sharpen on the pavement. Frost sparkles scarlet on the edges of bricks and windowsills. Then it’s gone.”

— Bridget Collins

22. “I don’t want to see anyone and I don’t want to be alone.”

— Bridget Collins

23. “Time expanded and shrank to instants and eternities: a spasm of pleasure, sunlight on the ceiling, his fingers digging into my shoulder, half-darkness and the rich smell of wine that was older than we were.”

— Bridget Collins

24. “My heart was so light I could have flown. The memory of it takes my breath away. I didn’t know happiness was that simple.”

— Bridget Collins

25. “Sometimes I wonder whether any of us tells the truth about anything.”

— Bridget Collins

26. “En fin, supongo que el conocimiento siempre es una especie de magia.”

— Bridget Collins

27. “Havilland calls himself an artist, but ultimately a binder is merely the rectum through which waste is squeezed into another shape.”

— Bridget Collins

28. “Gossip is public property.”

— Bridget Collins

29. “We’re all as human here as anywhere else.”

— Bridget Collins

30. “The snow has melted and there’s a fine drizzle falling. It sweeps across the drive like gauze. Grey, grey, grey. I want to drink it until it turns my blood into water and my brain to nothing.”

— Bridget Collins

31. “I had to go outside and listen to the dry wind in the reeds, just to be sure that I hadn’t gone deaf.”

— Bridget Collins

32. “Here the clock in the hall dredged up seconds like stones and dropped them again into the pool of the day, letting each ripple widen before the next one fell.”

— Bridget Collins

33. “I’d always loved the first days of spring, when suddenly the prison of winter broke wide open.”

— Bridget Collins

34. “She’s read about all this. She’s never done it. He pauses, as if he’s overheard her thought. ‘Are we mad enough to do this?’ ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes.”

— Bridget Collins

35. “It hits him like a draught of water when he didn’t realise he was thirsty, like the first drag of a cigarette or the first mouthful of a Martini. He smiles back. For maybe half a second the world hangs immobile, the space between them singing.”

— Bridget Collins

36. “You know, what I hate most about him is the person he makes me into.”

— Bridget Collins

37. “Like a doctor, aren’t you,” he said, without a question mark. “You come here and drain a boil. A huge throbbing carbuncle, the size of someone’s whole life. Then you wash your hands and pretend you’ve never smelt anything but roses. And you walk away with heavier pockets, until the next time. So like a doctor. All for the benefit of mankind. Except you’re really doing it because men like my father like the taste of pus...”

— Bridget Collins

38. “It was driving me mad, this constant desire- no, need- to hit him, when I knew I didn’t dare.”

— Bridget Collins

39. “He splashes his face, blinking and gasping, until the cut on his chin has stopped stinging. The water in the basin is pink. His face wavers in it, a ruddy ghost. He’s glad to turn away from it; although as he leaves the room he imagines his reflection still there, staring up at the ceiling, waiting for him to come back.”

— Bridget Collins

40. “I’d do almost anything not to have to be myself any more.”

— Bridget Collins

41. “There was sympathy in her face, as if I could tell her everything and she would understand.”

— Bridget Collins

42. “The darkness rolled and sucked like a tide, at arm’s length; and then, instead of drowning me, it receded.”

— Bridget Collins

43. “Binders are born, not made. And you are a binder born, boy. You may not like the idea of it much now. But you’ll grow to understand.”

— Bridget Collins

44. “I missed Lucian so much it was like a wound. I could feel the outline of it, a desperate fiery ache that started under my sternum and ended somewhere in my groin. If I moved, or spoke, or inhaled too deeply, it hurt more. I’d never thought I could want to die: but it was like drowning over and over again, except that the final blackness never came.”

— Bridget Collins

45. “Books should be beautiful. No one sees, that’s not the point. It’s a way to honour people – like grave-goods in olden times.”

— Bridget Collins