54 quotes found
Writer · British · 1967
British writer (born 1967)
“I had started to desire power, because what I now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by som...”
“Most of didnt know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.”
“To observe is not to not feelin fact, it is to put yourself at the mercy of feeling, like the child's warm skin meeting the cold air of midnight. My own children, too, have been roused from the unc...”
“If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.”
“The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine - well, she's asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrat...”
“As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others e...”
“Shame is something you'll find a lot of - particularly Catholic - girls feel about their bodies, about their sexuality, about their diet, about anything you like. Shame is the way you keep them dow...”
“The 'good' mother, with her fixed smile, her rigidity, her goody-goody outlook, her obsession with unnecessary hygiene, is in fact a fool. It is the 'bad' mother, unafraid of a joke and a glass of ...”
“I have a romantic conception of the writer's life, and the sort of writer's life that I admire is probably a childless life, possibly a marriageless life, certainly a travelling life - I'm in awe o...”
“Yet I believe, as I say, that it was precisely this underhand act that gave birth to her vitriol, for people are at their least forgiving when they themselves have been underhand, as though they wo...”
“Es dificilísimo que hasta los más bondadosos, los que más te quieren, se tomen tus intereses verdaderamente en serio, porque suelen aconsejarte desde una vida más segura y más aislada que la tuya, ...”
“She was surprised to discover that Paola was thirty-four. 'What have you been doing all this time?' she wanted to ask, but instead she said, 'What brought you to England?''There was a man,' Paola s...”
“The Cunning Little Vixen, in which a fox is caught by a hunter and kept in a farmyard with the other animals. He keeps her because he loves her, despite the fact she is destructive, and there is a ...”
“People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.”
“That’s writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn’t turn up.”
“At times, Melete continued, it had seemed to her that this fact was what had created this behavior. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated ...”
“Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.”
“What she did learn from all the books was something else, something she hadn't really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life. In the sense of w...”
“I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I ...”
