96 quotes found
“What would I put in my bottom drawer? I would put only sharp objects, the clean lines of broken glass, the honed steel of paring knives, the tiny saw-teeth of bread knives and the soothing edges o...”
“And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!”
“He had made a vow, a private promise to the world in the long dark watches of the night, that if he did survive then in the great afterward he would always try to be kind, to live a good, quiet lif...”
“Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board...”
“The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.”
“They were lucky. They'd been given history.”
“He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes...”
“Numinous," Ursula said, breaking the silence eventually. "There's a spark of the divine in the world -- not God, er'er done with God, but something. Is it love? Not silly romantic love, but somethi...”
“All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination.And this one is Teddy's.”
“Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness”
“If an author was a god, then he was a very poor second-rate one, scrabbling around in the foothills of Olympus.”
“Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragi...”
“The past is what you take with you.”
“... Angus had a "pretty normal childhood." Bertie had immediately mistrusted him. Nobody had a normal childhood.”
“Oh, man, the nursery, Dominic said, what a hell-hole. If I had kids Id give them the nicest room in the house.You do have kids, his kid said.Oh, yeah, well, right, you know what I mean.”
“You must never believe everything they say about a person. Generally speaking, most of it will be lies, half-truths at best.”
“In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner ...”
“Twittering just seemed to be people telling other people what they were doing--getting in the shower, making coffee. Who on earth wanted to know these things?...Babble and twitter. Full of sound an...”
“...and no man gave you a fur coat without expecting to receive something inreturn. Except for one's husband, of course, who expected nothing beyond modest gratitude.”
“So much for progress. How quickly civilization could dissolve into its more ugly elements.”
