Ali Shaw (writer)

Ali Shaw is a novelist. His novels include 'The Girl with Glass Feet' (2009), 'The Man who Rained' (2012), and 'The Trees' (2016). He won the  in 2010 for first first novel, 'The Girl with Glass Feet'.

The Trees (2016)

 * The rain watered the world so heavily that he wondered if it might rinse it away. He did not think he would mind if it did.
 * Part 1, Chapter 1 - at p.3 [Page numbers per the Bloomsbury 2016 paperback edition.]


 *  "Work out what you really want from life." 
 * Pt. 1, Ch. 4 - p.21 (and motif)


 * "There's no shame in giving up," said Adrien. "I give up on all sorts of things." He whipped out his hip flask and offered it to her. She drank more than he felt he had been offering.
 * Pt. 1, Ch. 4 - p.25


 * How he hated gardening. "Mother Nature is a psychopath," he'd told Michelle, "and I won't spend my weekends on my hands and knees, painting her toenails."
 * Pt. 1, Ch. 5 - p.37


 * She worried about [her son, Seb] often, especially when rising waters were mentioned on the news, or the death of a species announced, or noises made about ice caps slipping into oceans. She thought of Seb leaning over his laptop, and what kind of world he was growing himself up in. And when the news brought tales of louder disasters, and to her shame Hannah found them easy to forget in her day-to-day rush, she feared a flood or a tidal wave of heart-stopping magnitude sweeping through the landscapes of Seb's future, and him having simply no idea of how to cope.
 * Pt. 1, Ch. 6 - p.42


 * "We're vegetarians," explained Hannah, "did I mention that before?" "Er . . . no," said Adrien, a carnivore's disappointment writ large across his face.
 * Pt. 1, Ch. 6 - p.49


 * "Little things overwhelm you. Sometimes it's as if everything overwhelms you." "You're right," he'd said, wiping tears and rainwater alike from his cheeks. "But in those times the world just seems so damned formidable." "I want to help you, Adrien. But you mustn't give up. You can't wait for the world to be perfect before you start living in it."
 * Pt. 1, Ch. 10 - p.94


 * "How did you get to be so fearless?" Adrien asked Hiroko. "I mean, I wish I could deal with all this as naturally as you." "My friend Carter used to say that the world keeps no secrets. Look it in the eye if you can. Everything is there to see." "Is that supposed to make it easier?" "You can look away if you want. Lots of people do. You can make up a whole pretend world to look at instead." Adrien hung his head. He supposed that was precisely his own method, although he wasn't sure that his pretend world was any less frightening than the real one. If there was one thing Adrien Thomas had always known about himself, it was his limitations. It was not, deep down, woodcraft that he had truly sought to learn here. It was how to be a man who wasn't weak, and who was sure of his place in the world.
 * Pt. 2, Ch. 2 - p.134, 135, 142


 * Adrien had always considered cider a crude drink, flavoured like a highway underpass. The cider was bitter and salty both, like sea air cheering the senses just as it stung them. He had a lot of thinking to do, and thinking was always less daunting with a glass in hand.
 * Pt. 2, Ch. 2 - p.140, 141


 * She folded her arms, suddenly feeling like she used to at school: the stupid one who answered questions wrong. That was the reason why she didn't do much talking. Talking was deceit, one of the games people played to keep themselves from looking the world in the eye.
 * Pt. 2, Ch. 3 - p.148


 *  "Anything you do a lot of, you get good at." 
 * Pt. 2, Ch. 3 - p.149


 * "He said, "What's the point of being alive if all you do is look at a screen?"
 * Pt. 2, Ch. 7 - p.176


 * "I don't think I could ever be an actual parent," she said. "I'd just be too scared of fucking it up." "Me too. I'm definitely never having any kids."
 * Pt. 2, Ch. 9 - p.189


 * She had lost faith in him so gradually that at first he'd hardly even noticed.
 * Pt. 3, Ch. 7 - p.261


 * "I don't think I'm going to be a pessimist when I grow up." He chuckled. "I never thought I was going to be one either, when I was your age."
 * Pt. 3, Ch. 9 - p.281


 * Self-loathing was a difficult thing for those who had none of their own to understand. It had its own seasons. It could trick you into thinking it had lifted, only to come cycling around again. You attacked yourself in the same ways you always had. You flung the same accusations. Perhaps you could no more rid yourself of self-loathing than you could rid the world of winter. What was certain was that, like winter, in its wake it left you bare.
 * Pt. 3, Ch. 12 - p.310


 * "Things die," said Leonard. "Deal with it."
 * Pt. 4, Ch. 3 - p.340


 * "They're, . . my friends." You said you hated having friends. You said all they did was waste your free time, and cost you money at Christmas."
 * Pt. 4, Ch. 5 - p.358


 * "What good is being in love with a person, if it only binds you to a thousand quiet disappointments, and new problems for every one that you fix?"
 * Pt. 4, Ch. 5 - p.361


 * "Look at you. Your folded arms. Your smug sneer. How do men like you get put in charge of the world, when you don't know the first thing about it?"
 * Pt. 4, Ch. 9 - p.398


 * "Listen, have you ever had one of those nights when you guess how many healthy years you've got left and think, Oh shit, that's not enough?"
 * Pt. 4, Ch. 10 - p.407