Pat Barker

Patricia Mary W. Barker, CBE, FRSL (née Drake; born 8 May 1943) is an English writer and novelist.

Border Crossing (2001)

 * But sir, certainly, there isn't any proof as to my guilt...
 * Danny
 * The man needs to learn how to controll his anger, he is crossing a border here, and he has no right
 * Inspector rogers
 * The forensic evidence for Danny's guilt was overwhelming, but he was a good liar.
 * Danny was a bottomless pit. He wanted other people to fill him, only in the process the other people ended up drained.
 * ...the horror of the images impossible to connect with the child he'd just left.
 * I thought he was one of the most dangerous boys we've ever had through the school.
 * Mrs. Greene
 * I don't know why I killed her, I didn't know then and I don't know now. And I don't know how to live with it.
 * Danny to Tom
 * But [Tom] was used to switching off, to living his life in separate compartments.
 * [Tom] denies [Lauren] his attention in memory, as he did in life.
 * [Tom had] learnt to value detachment: the clinician's splinter of ice in the heart.
 * When we got married, you didn't even want kids. It was... you and me.
 * Tom
 * [Tom] was fed up to the back teeth with being a walking, talking sperm bank.
 * It was extraordinarily distracting: this feeling of a pivotal moment in his own life being played out in front of an uninvited audience.
 * [Danny] was very, very good at getting people to step across that invisible border. Lambs to the slaughter.
 * You wring a chicken's neck, you don't expect to find it running round the yard next morning, do you?
 * Danny
 * Do you think it's different, killing a rabbit and killing a person?
 * They'd awoken that morning to a curious stillness. Clouds sagged over the river, and there was mist like sweat over the mudflats.
 * [Tom] was less than halfway across the causeway when the mist thickened.
 * The fired burnt furiously, piled high with logs. Danny had dragged the log basket onto the hearth rug and was kneeling beside it, a log in each hand, watching the fire burn.
 * A rasp and flare as [Danny] struck the match. A doubled reflection of the flame appeared in his eyes, whose pupils had not contracted, as one would have expected, but grown large, as if starved for light.
 * A second later, the water enclosed him in a coffin of ice.
 * The boy [Danny] looked like a baby: purple faced, wet hair, that drowned look of a newborn, cast up on to its mother's suddenly creased and spongy belly.
 * ...he'd seen the boy's [Danny's] body hang suspended... an umbilical cord of silver bubbles linking his slack mouth to the air.
 * [Lauren's] eyes were glazed, inward-looking. Like labour, Tom thought, the irony as sour as the mud on his tongue.
 * Do you think confession's the only route to redemption?