316 quotes found
Writer · English · 1959
English writer (born 1959)
“Unmoor the boat, we could godownriver...History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities surface towards us and then sink away and some we hook out and o...”
“I want to touch you.''And if you did touch me, what then?''I would find a language of beginning.”
“Singing is my pleasure, but not in church, for the parson said the gargoyles must remain on the outside, not seek room in the choir stalls. So I sing inside the mountain of my flesh, and my voice i...”
“In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.'Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this ...”
“I can't believe that we have reached the end of everything. The red dust is frightening. The carbon dioxide is real. Water is expensive. Bio-tech has created as many problems as it has fixed, but w...”
“And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The gr...”
“I kissed her and forgot death.”
“Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.”
“Every journey conceals another journey within its lines; the path not taken and the forgotten angle. These are the journeys I wish to record. Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or...”
“You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return. And the wound will take you there.”
“Our contradictions are never so to ourselves.”
“We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.”
“What you think is the heart might well be another organ.”
“And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with?”
“When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free.”
“People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe.”
“Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. Its a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, its a way of keeping...”
“I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.”
“...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.”
“Much of what I have done is left unfinished- not because I left it too soon, not because I was lazy, but because it had a life of it's own that continues without me. Children, I suppose, are always...”
