Virginia McGregor

Tripi ne croyait pas aux frontières, au fait de délimiter l'endroit où les gens avaient le droit de vivre et de se déplacer, où d'autres devaient se tenir à l'écart. Pour Tripi, la terre appartenait à tout le monde; c'était quand les gens construisaient des murs, exigeaient des clôtures et verrouillaient des portes que les problèmes débutaient.

Mrs Zas has been teaching me basic waltz steps when the shop's quiet. It turns out that being clumsy doesn't affect dancing that much.

'Sit down for a moment'. She kneels in front of me and unscrews her mascara wand. 'The secret is to enhance your beauty, not to distort it. And to be true to your character.'

They say that all babies looked like their fathers, that it's an evolutionary trick to keep men from abandoning their families: when fathers see themselves reflected in their babies, they swell with the pride of ownership.

La guerre civile, c'est les mots que Tripi avait utilisés, un pays qui se retourne contre lui-même, comme une dispute dans une famille.

We carry the past with us, and sometimes that past is so very, very sad that it haunts us and damages us.

Textbooks tell us facts, Jake, poems tell us the truth.

I must be the only teenager on the planet who’s trying to convince her parents to eat healthily.

Depression is sneaky. It hides, waiting for something to happen to knock you off your stride and then it pounces. And once it strikes, it swallows you whole.

There's a saying Dad's used whenever I've been sacred of doing something important: "If you don't let go of the edge, you'll never learn to swim".

Jack says he likes being an only child but I wish I had brothers and sisters. It gets lonely being stuck between Mum and Dad. I mean, I love them, but I wish that there were someone to share stuff with, especially the bad stuff.

(…) when you see a couple that are meant to be together, their edges go blurry and they kind of meld together and become more like one person than two (…)

If the lounge is Mum’s world, the TV is her sun.

My phone buzzes. It’s one of those cheap ones that only calls and texts.

Loneliness isn't about being without people, it's about being with people who make you feel alone.

Divorce. Death. There are guidelines for those. You get angry and lash out. You mourn. But disappearance? It doesn't allow you to let go, to turn your love from a living thing to a memory.

You need to defend yourself, says Ella. You need to say mean things back. (...) But Willa can never think of mean things to say back. (...) Willa didn't think it was fair that the only choices available were (a) being mean, or (b) being walked over.

-- Vous venez du Moyen-Orient? C’est comme ça que ça s’appelle, nous a dit Mme Harris, vous venez d’une partie du monde où il fait très chaud, avec du sable partout, et où les gens s’habillent avec des draps.
Tripi sourit. C’était la description la plus aimable qu’on ait faite de lui depuis son arrivée en Angleterre.
-- Oui… Je viens de Syrie.