156 quotes found
“He wanted to live life to the extreme, but without any mess or complications. He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph. Things s...”
“The beauty of the ultrasound scan is something that only parents can appreciate, but Emma had seen these things before and knew what was required of her. ‘Beautiful,’ she sighed, though in truth it...”
“Every week seems to bring another luxuriantly creamy envelope, the thickness of a letter-bomb, containing a complex invitation – a triumph of paper engineering – and a comprehensive dossier of phon...”
“From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions - fear, desire, anger - serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is perman...”
“Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them.”
“Was it the happiest day of our lives? Probably not, if only because the truly happy days tend not to involve so much organisation, are rarely so public or so expensive. The happy ones sneak up, une...”
“But now the train had finally begun to move, and Albie had switched the fearless truth-telling eye of his camera lens from his untied laces to the walls of the tunnels under east London, because yo...”
“He had always imagined that some sort of emotional mental equipment was meant to arrive, when he was forty-five, say, or fifty, a kind of kit that would enable him to deal with the impending loss o...”
“The problem with telling people that they can do anything they want to do is that it is objectively, factually inaccurate. Otherwise the whole world would just be ballet dancers and pop stars.”
“Live each day as if it’s your last’, that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn’t practical. Better by far t...”
“No-one ever built a statue of a critic.”
“The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.”
“Whatever happens tomorrow, we had today; and I'll always remember it”
“Douglas, you have an incredible capacity for missing the point. Will you listen to me, just for once? The debate does not matter. It's not about the issues. Albie might have been naive or ridiculou...”
“What about damp? What about flooding? Wouldn't it make sense to have a little lawn or garden as a sort of buffer zone between the house and the water? But then it wouldn't be Venice, said Connie's ...”
“[He] didn’t like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.”
