316 quotes found
Writer · English · 1959
English writer (born 1959)
“Odd that a festival to celebrate the most austere of births should end up being all about conspicuous consumption.”
“Anyone could see the ticker tape. It was more frightening than the that never stopped calculating the national debt. This one said '27 SHOPPING DAYS TO CHRISTMAS'.It might as well have said '27 DAY...”
“I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.”
“Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result.”
“Things are continually beginning again; theyre never really resolved, you know. They are only resolved temporarily. We live in a society that peddles solutions, whether its solutions to those extra...”
“There are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it.”
“By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's.”
“In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.”
“At bed-time I went into my room and put out the light. I didn't get undressed. I lay on my bed and looked out of the window at the stars. I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. I've...”
“A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce - we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has...”
“I wasn't getting better. I was getting worse.I did not go to the doctor because I didn't want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this was the rest of my life I coul...”
“The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story - of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the stor...”
“Look at all that rubbish," she said, watching the electric van slowly whirr from bin to bin, little men in gloves removing it all."They're taking it away," I said. "Where to?" she said. "It just ge...”
“When I was born, my mother dressed me as a boy because she could not afford to feed any more daughters. By the mystic laws of gender and economics, it ruins a peasant to place half a bowl of figs i...”
“As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never we...”
“you act out what it feels like to be the one who doesnt belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you.”
“Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.”
“There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together.Forgiveness unblocks the future." (p.225)”
“The journey is about coming home....There is always the return. And the wound will take you there. It is a blood-trail." (p. 220,222)”
“If the demons lived anywhere it was here.”
