The Changeover Quotes

“There are always two people involved in cruelty, aren’t there? One to be vicious and someone to suffer!”

“On a recent visit Laura had watched with consternation as the child punished the doll. ‘I’m allowed to do this,’ he said, hitting it less, Laura felt, out of jealousy for the new baby, than because he had been given the chance to be infinitely cruel to something infinitely yielding.”

“Stamp, your name is to be Laura. I’m sharing my name with you. I’m putting my power into you and you must do my work. Don’t listen to anyone but me. You are to be my command laid on my enemy.”

“She was free to be jealous, but somehow not free, at school, to go and sit with him in the way Carol was doing.”

“Somewhere in the flesh of the earth the dreadful earthquake shuddered, the tide walked to and fro on the leash of the moon, rainbows formed, winds swept the sky like giant brooms piling up clouds before them, clouds which writhed into different shapes, melted into rain or darkened, bruised themselves against an unseen antagonist and went on their way, laced with forking rivers of lightning, complete with white electric tributaries.”

“Out of this infinite vision an infinity of details could be drawn, but Sorry had settled on one, and from the endless series a particular beach was chosen and began to form around Laura - a beach of iron-dark sand and shells like frail stars, and a wonderful wide sea that stretched, neither green nor blue, but inked by the approach of night into violet and black, wrinkling with its own salty puzzles, right out to a distant, pure horizon.”

“Given the chance to be cruel did you get cruelty out of your system by acting on the chance, or did you invite it in?”

″‘I don’t know what I think about power,’ Sorry said at last. ‘Mostly I want to go unseen. Of course, at home in my own room- that’s different. Outside, well- I’d rather knit the world up than tear it apart.‘”

“You are to be my command laid on my enemy. You’ll make a hole in him through which he’ll drip away until he runs dry. As he drips out darkness, we’ll smile together, me outside, you inside. We’ll... we’ll crush him between our smiles.”

“The stamp was a ridiculous object to consider, after such a threatening journey as Laura’s, yet lying in Winter’s palm it became sinister in its own way.”