50 Important Quotes You Should Pay Attention to in Like a House on Fire

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#11: “Another thing: the last couple of months, he’d felt this heavy squeezing under his sternum, slowing him down.”

• Technique: Reflective language, recurring motif
• Short story: Sleepers 

#12: “Just Ray…because they need an example, he thought wearily as he peeled off his gloves, the realisation flaring like a little chunk of burning rock, a tiny meteor.”

• Technique: Metaphor
• Short story: Sleepers 

#13: “He waited there for them, next to the sleepers, lowering his bare hands for comfort onto weathered, solid old redgum, hauled up and discarded but wth so much life in it, still, it just broke your heart to see it go to waste.”

• Technique: Defiant tone, symbolism 
• Short story: Sleepers 

#14: “You’ve got your own life… they can’t be dictating it”

• Technique: High modality
• Short story: Cake 

#15: “The horoscope page lying limp in my hands telling me everything will align for me at a time I least expect it.”

• Technique: Astrological allusion 
• Short story: Waiting 

#16: “They don’t bother giving you the actual ultrasound films now. Well, they don’t bother giving them to me, anyhow.”

• Techniques: Repetition, reflective language 
• Short story: Waiting 

#17: “I spared him. Kept the news of those two blue lines on the test to myself.” 

• Technique: Internal monologue 
• Short story: Waiting 

#18: “What they should put in them, thought Roley, is a little brain, something to knock around uselessly in that bubble of fluid as snow swirled down ceaselessly and never stopped, while some big band somewhere kept on shaking”

• Technique: Metaphor, motif
• Short story: Little Plastic Shipwreck 

#19: “He thinks of the kilometres she tries to cover each night on that stationary bike, the endless net surfing she’s done on sperm motility and ovarian cysts, like someone gathering evidence for a case they have to win.”

• Technique: Reflective language, simile, metaphor 
• Short story: Static 

#20: “I don’t want to get taken away I said, and my voice was all stupid and high and squeaky like a cartoon.”

• Technique: Simile, irony 
• Short story: Seventy-Two Derwents 

Relationships

#21: “It would kill him, she thinks, to show pleasure or relief or excitement.”

• Techniques: Hyperbole 
• Short story: Flexion 

#22: “Despite all his resolve to stay pleasant and attentive, today of all days, something has nevertheless turned a tap on inside him and his energy is draining away.”

• Techniques: Metaphor, emotive language 
• Short story: Ashes 

#23: “He longed so much to be with Scott that it almost hurt”

• Techniques: Emotive language 
• Short story: Ashes 

#24: “Since his father died, Chris keeps coming across small reminders everywhere, set like mouse traps ready to snap, like little buried landmines.” 

• Techniques: Simile, metaphor
• Short story: Ashes 

#25: “There’s no need to…well… throw it in her face. It would kill her.”

• Techniques: Oxymoron, low modality 
• Short story: Ashes 

#26: “Links are what you’re after, linked hands, connections, answers, the web like a big stretched safety net.”

• Techniques: Simile
• Short story: Cross-Country

#27: “Warm blooms briefly in her chest, tight and aching like tears”

• Techniques: Metaphor, simile
• Short story: Tender

#28: “Arden rush of helpless, terrible love” 

• Techniques: Oxymoron, irony 
• Short story: Tender

#29: “But now that I think of it, a house on fire is a perfect description for what seems to be happening now: these flickering small resentments licking their way up into the walls, this faint, acrid smell of smoke.” 

• Technique: Metaphor, personification, inverted idiom 
• Short story: Like a House on Fire

#30: “That’s the extent of how we communicate these days, in the tiny squeezed and inflamed gap somewhere between slippage and rupture.” 

• Technique: Metaphor, idiom 
• Short story: Like a House on Fire

#31: “I look at her, feeling that small heat build between us… this is how you do it, I think, stick by careful stick over ashes, oxygen and fuel, a controlled burn.”

• Technique: Metaphor, idiom
• Short story: Like a House on Fire 

#32: “Thick and sweet and full of mysterious antibodies” (in regards to the colostrum)

• Techniques: Simile, metaphor, symbolism 
• Short story: Five Dollar Family 

#33: “But his voice is like someone you’re hanging up on, going small and high-pitched and distant as you put the phone down.” 

• Technique: Simile, symbolism 
• Short story: Five Dollar Family 

#34: “Holding a latte, or holding a phone, but none of them a child’s hand, all of them divested of toddlers and seemingly glad of it.”

• Techniques: Juxtaposition, irony
• Short story: Cake 

#35: “All standing “We Are the World” style with arms round each other… something that in real life would involve several simultaneous translators and a fair whack of fairy dust.”

• Techniques: Cultural allusion, irony 
• Short story: White Spirit 

Identity

#36: “You’re not the first gay man whose parents didn’t understand him.”

• Technique: Historical allusion 
• Short story: Ashes 

#37: “The person she’d been before birth, in fact, seems like a dopey, thickheaded version of who she’s become now.”

• Technique: Reflective language, simile
• Short story: Five Dollar Family

#38: “You understand, as the camera’s indifferent shutter clicks again, that the sundresses are about your mother, that you’d seen in her face when you’d asked for he training bra was a tremor of terror, not scorn.”

• Technique: Second person narration
• Short story: Whirlpool 

#39: “Nobody will graffiti anything they feel a sense of ownership and inclusion about.”

• Technique: Reflective language, cultural allusion 
• Short story: White Spirit

#40: “On every single one of your new pencils, they have stamped the word artist.”

• Technique: Symbolism, metaphor 
• Short story: Seventy-Two Derwents 

Hope and Chaos

#41: “The two of us content, for this perfect moment, to believe we can go on humming, and that this path before us will stretch on forever.”

• Technique: Metaphor, juxtaposition 
• Short story: Laminex and Mirrors 

#42: “Almost twenty years of near-invisibility, the accident gives her an odd kind of glamour”

• Technique: Irony
• Short story: Flexion 

#43: “Everything… seems to be teetering on the verge of coming apart” 

• Technique: Ellipsis, figurative language 
• Short story: Tender 

#44: “She’s burning with bright energy, like someone flicked a switch on.”

• Technique: Metaphor, symbolism, simile
• Short story: Five-Dollar Family 

#45: “It’s as if the cry is pulling a wire through her”

• Technique: Simile, emotive language 
• Short story: Five-Dollar Family 

#46: “You open your eyes and you’re in the middle of it, letting yourself be loose and helpless, staring up at the aching blue of the sky.”

• Technique: Oxymoron, personification, emotive language
• Short story: Whirlpool 

#47: “Then the both of them, his mother and Marie, turning their Evil rays onto him, as if the entire thing is his ideas, his fault, when all he’s done is get out his credit card to pay for the whole shebang” 

• Techniques: Symbolism, emotive language 
• Short story: Static 

#48: “Anthony put the handset down onto the stones and gazes at the plants, so steely and barbed and implacable, something even neglect and drought put together can’t seem to kill.”

• Technique: Symbolism, natural imagery 
• Short story: Static 

#49: “It’s amazing isn’t it, the level to which we’ll invent what we need.” 

• Technique: High modality
• Short story: Cross Country

#50: “I want to say I hope you are not sad now because you helped me and I tried to be brave like you said and now I think I’m doing good.”

• Technique: Positive tone
• Short story: Seventy-Two Derwents