The Accidental Quotes
"Grace under pressure; the uses of mystery; how to get what I want."
"It isn't morning till the light, though actually it was morning as soon as it was even a fraction of a second past twelve."
"People are just different from other people, is what she thinks."
"It is weird to look at someone. It is weird when they look back at you."
"Imagine if you were in the room, the living room ha ha ha, and you didn’t expect it to be alive."
"Cars are a very bad idea in such a polluted world."
"All there is is the waking-up birds, all there is is the trees moving in the wind."
"It doesn’t matter any more what numbers add up to."
"Life never stopped being glorious, a glorious surprise, a glorious renewal all over again."
"He particularly liked the word sheer too; as a word it was calmed and smoothed yet still so bloody boyishly enthusiastic, it still went as far as it could."
"She had entered him like he was water. Like he was a dictionary and she was a word he hadn’t known was in him."
"Dessert, is there any? Eve was saying now, passing through the room. She was smiling her persuasive smile."
"It’s a Barnum and Bailey world, Just as phoney as it can be, But it wouldn’t be make-believe."
"She had probably left the lights on overnight, he thought. Maybe the small ceiling light. There was probably no petrol in it."
"Nuts were sweet. No innuendo. It was innocent."
"She was an ambitious girl. Let’s start at the very beginning, he’d said to her as he’d unbuttoned her top. It’s a very good place to start."
"His heart was heavy. It was heavier than the train."
"Magnus: a happy accident, a happy unexpected pregnancy, the happy beginnings of an unexpected family."
"There’s many a hen that lays an egg. The yellow will always return to the broom."
"Be careful not to let folk over your threshold till you’re absolutely sure who they are."
"Meant, by Eve, to hold unhappy things together."
"It's complicated, with family. You understand, I'm sure."
"We are a family, Amber, as you will have seen this evening."
"The taste of toast and marmalade, early spring light, a radio on the table."
"It's just a two-dimensional picture of a place I've never seen."
"It is to make the supermarket look more old-fashioned, from the past."
"It could have killed somebody, anything, if it had hit a windscreen."
"It was my fault so don't give her a hard time about it."
"You are for me the Beginning of Beginnings. You have taught me the meaning of faithful."
"You are a perpetual beautiful summer, a summer that goes on for months, day after day after day of uninterrupted gentle sun and summer air."
"When I look at you I feel that I am the only man alive ever to be able to fly so close to the sun. Don't melt my wings!"
"The tops of the trees shift all round them a moment before they feel the actual breeze that shifted the leaves above them that moment ago."
"It is too hot sitting here in the sun. The sun is a huge red eye."
"Churches are usually locked. It stops vandalism."
"In sixty seconds it probably moved a bit in the air and it must even have grown but in a way that can't be seen by the human eye."
"Astrid has never really noticed how green things are before."
"If she looks hard enough she will maybe know or learn something about greenness or whatever."
"The smell of the hot summer attic, the smell of them both, stuck with amazing sweat."
"Persistence of vision. You must have seen something so dark that it’s carried on affecting your vision even though you’re not looking directly at it any more."
"The Jordan Curve Theorem. Every simple closed curve has an inside as well as an outside."
"360 degrees is the total number of degrees in a revolution."
"Is it innocent, as in a state of goodness or whatever, if you simply don’t know about all those people in the Holocaust? Or is it just naïve, stupid? What use is that kind of innocence anyway?"
"It is like his mother being obsessed by the foul things that have happened to people; all those books about the Holocaust she’s got piled up in her study at home."
"Something about Amber at the centre of it like an axis is what is holding them all together right now in this room, keeping everything going round, stopping everything from fragmenting into an exploded nothing that shatters itself out into the furthest reaches of the known universe."
"Only the names of some persons and places survive."
"The word 'and' is a little bullet of oxygen."
"This story, which gained immense popularity, is not heard of before the seventh century and there is nothing to suggest that she was anything other than imaginary."
"Right, Amber says. And sin, if I remember correctly without error, equals opposite over hypotenuse, right?"
"It is a simple calculation but you have to believe it."
"And she is being ironic about something though he can’t think what or how."
"Amber was an exotic fixative. Amber preserved things that weren’t meant to last."
"Fishermen braved oceans with just a net to harvest amber."
"Because she was light itself. Amber, walking through the world, lit the world, took the world, made it."
"He was a ruined nation, and obscene, and nothing meant what it was meant to mean."
"She looked about fifteen. He queued. He put the grapes in front of her like they were pearls."
"You’re never going to get the thing you want. Not till you work out what it is you want."
"A family, all of them, smiling. Who were they smiling for?"
"You’ve led a life unthinkable to most of the generations of women and men who birthed you."
"Is there a point in any written book? Was there a point in anything at all?"
"The restaurant was full of people looking to see who everybody else in the restaurant was."
"No, I mean dies, and that’s it. Finished. Done. Kaput. End. No more story."
"It’s a Scottish one this time, I think it’ll be quite popular."
"On the train out of London Eve watched her own reflection shift and change and revert to herself in the flashing-past scrubland and small towns and trees in the window, and was finally appalled."
"The dead on all the battlefields get up and walk. They walk and walk, they become a great crowd."
"A woman conducts a tiny orchestra whose players are no bigger than her hand."
"The whole of England, not just London, not just Islington, will be burning."
"Astrid doesn’t really miss the old stuff, just some of it."
"The only thing the thieves didn’t take was the answerphone."
"It is amazing that a photograph is forever but is really a kind of proof that nothing is longer than a split second in time."
"It is strange to be thinking about Amber as if she is in the past."
"It’s finished now. That time’s over. I’m warning you."
"The dawn is coming up red. Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning."
"It is a fact, it is official according to the newspaper, that the world is actually getting darker."
"It is like a curtain coming down in a theatre."
"Except that it isn’t the end. How can it be the end of anything? It’s just the beginning."
"Hurtling sounds like a little hurt being, like earthling, like something aliens from another planet would land on earth and call human beings who have been a little bit hurt."
"The sky is red, a storm is coming and all the cute chipmunks in the world are potential firebombs."
"The escalators carry on going round and round in their fixed direction circuit, folding mechanically into and out of themselves."
"You can start to forget it now, Michael said holding the letter. You can let it go."
"But what if Astrid came to a film like this one and was reduced by it, like this girl along from him?"
"A group of men were chained inside a cave, and all they saw, all they could see and all they’d ever seen of the world was the shadows their own fire made on the walls."
"It was liberating. It meant, for instance, that he could saunter into an early evening bookshop like this and do exactly as he’d just done."
"There are very few mountains in the British Isles which can not be walked up."
"An astonishing fact! Michael had known it, but never really thought about it, the head giving off energy like a lit hot lightbulb."
"You needed to buy overtrousers with zips so you didn’t have to take your shoes off to put them on. So simple it was genius, really."
"The coffee was foul. The cup rattled in its saucer as he put it back on the too-low table."
"He would go first to the Peak District, or Snowdonia, maybe to the Brecon Beacons or the Yorkshire Dales."
"Lightning, apparently, was responsible for taking the lives of a small number of climbers every year."
"Was it a crime? They were all consenting adults."
"The core of the body. The shell of the body."
"You don’t have to watch it if you don’t want to. This house is full of other rooms."