They Whisper in My Blood Quotes

“Family isn’t just a social construct, you know darling, it is formed in the heart. It’s instinctive, this feeling of belonging to someone whose absence keeps you incomplete. . .”
― Franciska Soares, They Whisper in my Blood

“Thomas was a killer already − of wild game − and was beginning to enjoy it. “But what animal is more dangerous than man?” he thought.”
― Franciska Soares, They Whisper in my Blood

“The breath tore from their nostrils in drifts as they pulped the virgin grass with their heavy boots, leaving angry dark welts that bled into the air in vapours of fresh green, and added to the riparian overtones of sediment and silt. The waters of the swollen rivers boiled angry alongside, engorged by the monsoons, racked by opposing currents, dimpled by wild swirling whirlpools.”
― Franciska Soares, They Whisper in my Blood

“. There were wisdoms to be gleaned from the rivers if only the men were of such a mind. But that kind of reality – that of the living − was far from their consideration. Dying and murder – this was what consumed their imaginings to the exclusion of everything else, that Wednesday at dawn.”
― Franciska Soares, They Whisper in my Blood

“Do you know that the island of Pitcairn in the South Pacific, has not more than two mutton shunters?” Francisco broke the silence as he mopped up a film of river spray from his face with the sleeve of his black coat, his white vest flashing high necked in the darkness. His otherwise forceful voice was subdued. Worry sat around the corners of his mouth. “And they are known to be encouraged by a small fine to look the other way if they received a complaint after a ding-dong such as this?” Francisco said out loud, all the while he thought: “This bundobust could very well destroy me.”
― Franciska Soares, They Whisper in my Blood

“Under the cover of darkness, that’s when duels were arranged, to conceal the proceedings that were frowned upon by law; and there was enough time for sobering-up if the challenge was prompted by intemperance brought on by too much drink. This duel though, was preplanned. “. . . that was how a dress sword came to be a part of a gentleman’s formal attire,” Francisco thus concluded his disquisition on duels that had proceeded at sinuous length when the three friends: Rodrigo, Miguel and himself, had gathered in his study to strategize just last Monday. Both parties had agreed to use pistols, not swords which was the weapon of choice up until the end of the last century. “If you can afford one, you can have a bespoke pistol made, Rodrigo,” said Francisco who, as was his wont, had been on a fact-finding mission about duels. These pistols came in cases complete with The Twenty-six Commandments, the code book that laid down the methodus pugnandi, the same book that Miguel had now folded and shoved into his pocket, its pages soft like cloth from much handling – and the damp from the river-mist. He and Francisco shuffled around in the shadows cast by the incipient pre-dawn sun, still unsure of their roles in this debauchery.”
― Franciska Soares, They Whisper in my Blood

“She let her mind tailor a seam across the hem of her life as he sold her a fantasy, offered
her a charkha on which to weave hope. “You have done well not to bend to the burden of your fears because it can splinter dreams,”
said the man called Rodrigo.”
― Franciska Soares, They Whisper in my Blood

“They rolled over her − the words − with an unexpectedness, as though something of great importance had been said, but she could not catch their meaning. She consulted the tree, with her ear jammed to its trunk. Then a funny thing happened. A switch
clicked inside her and all the fear and terror that had stoked her hopelessness disappeared. The incipient cancerous tumor that had threatened to derail her young life lay severed, and squirmed in a death-throe like the bodiless tail of a lizard.”
― Franciska Soares, They Whisper in my Blood

“The world is so special when there is no one in
it.”
― Franciska Soares, They Whisper in my Blood

“And he blamed the penny-whistle between his legs; that which had pushed him into emotional incontinence this time, every time.”
― Franciska Soares, They Whisper in my Blood

“Old anger is retrievable, you know. But it’s up to us to destroy their blood-sucking pathology.”
― Franciska Soares, They Whisper in my Blood

“How can we live through this Shyam?” she asked in a small voice. How could their instant history be ballast against this? Or could some MacGyverism in their arsenal return them from where they were hurled? Her eyes still wet with tears, raked through his.”
― Franciska Soares, They Whisper in my Blood

“Memory. Genes. That’s how life spoke to the future. The story that never ends – it’s the art of survival.”
― Franciska Soares, They Whisper in my Blood

“She sighed and walked over to the tall windows peering into the gloominess of smokefall. A thin scrim of fog huddled against the hills and the moon winked half-lidded in the murky sky that had merged with the horizon. The fire crackled for attention and she swerved to gaze at its throbbing
red-orange wood-heart that held a million days of sunlight.”
― Franciska Soares, They Whisper in my Blood