Quotes by Amanda Craig

“Very happy or unhappy, people disappear.”

“You know the only rule you need to know to get on in this country? Never complain, never explain.”

“I am a Jewish mother. My dying words will be, Put a jumper on”

“Just about the worst thing an artist can do is to try and be a nice person.”

“Ive noticed that whenever institutions claim to be confident of anything it means the complete opposite.”

“The idea that any of their offspring could possibly be accused of involvement in criminal activities caused deep offence, even to parents who believed that property was theft.”

“If you read fairy tales carefully, youll notice they are mostly about people who arent heroes. They dont have special powers, or gifts. Often they are despised as stupid, They are bullied, beaten u...”

“All paradises are there to be expelled from.”

“All age is a kind of tiredness, I think. When youre young, the lines never show. Every morning you wake unmarked, wiped clear by sleep. One day, though, you see lines that itch, as though some crum...”

“Polly was all too aware that much of her time on holiday would be spent doing the laundry and the cooking and the child-care and all the other chores that back in London would be shared with her cl...”

“Hatred bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

“I knew exactly when the fever had struck. I had been reading Hamlet in an English class at school. Everyone else stumbled, puzzling over the strange words. Then it had been my turn, and the languag...”

“Its the remarkable thing about academics: they look at Shakespeare and always see their own faces in him.”

“To thoughtful natures, events are like depth charges: the surface is calm, but the shock spreads further.”

“But this city is a world of its own, a country within a country. People are used to taking the old and making it news; and used, too, to taking the new and making it old. Every glass of water from ...”

“It’s not by accident that people talk of a state of confusion as not being able to see the wood for the trees, or of being out of the woods when some crisis is surmopunted. It is a place of loss, c...”

“Novelists,’ said Ivo, ‘are to the nineties what cooks were to the eighties, hairdressers to the seventies and pop-stars to the sixties… Merely, you know, an expression of the Zeitgeist, Nobody actu...”

“A hundred years ago, people had perfectly understood that you could die of a broken heart, now they thought you were making a fuss about nothing…Certain kinds of suffering are like radiation: they ...”

“Family is all politics. Everyone hates each other’s guts, if they’re honest… Most brothers and sisters try to top each other, given the chance; you always get the worst wars in countries with big f...”

“It’s so easy to believe that others deserve their fate, and the fact was that if nobody bothered to help other people then the worst would always happen… She stares out of her window at the busy st...”