Us Quotes
"The sweet habit of each other had begun to put lines around her mouth, lines that looked like quotation marks – as if everything she said had been said before."
"It’s the radiators, I’d say; it’s the joists contracting or expanding; it’s foxes."
"‘Well at least it’s not burglars,’ I said, though neither of us smiled and we did not get back to sleep that night."
"But before I say any more about this and the other events that took place during that particular summer, I should tell you a little about myself and paint some sort of ‘portrait in words’."
"Attempts have been made over the years to refer to me as ‘Doug’ or ‘Dougie’ or ‘Doogie’."
"‘Who wants cheese?’ said the host, and we moved quickly on to the relative merits of Corsica versus Sardinia, or something or other."
"I eat carefully to avoid the fate of my father, who died of a heart attack earlier than seemed right."
"But none of this is a surprise. I’ve been expecting to watch you grow older ever since we met. Why should it trouble me? It’s the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or forty-three. It’s that face."
"‘Lonely’ is a troubling word and not one to be tossed around lightly."
"‘The only acid in this house,’ I was fond of saying around the lab, ‘is deoxyribonucleic acid’ – a joke that never quite got the acclaim it deserved."
"If so, then I’m beginning my descent of that particular parabola."
"A light bulb going on, literally for Edison. One individual experiences this flash of insight and suddenly the world is altered fundamentally."
"It’s like listening to the Shipping Forecast."
"Familiarity, globalisation, cheap travel, mere weariness had diluted our sense of foreign-ness."
"Pharmacies! What’s with all the pharmacies? You’d think, from all the pharmacies, they’d be in a constant state of flu."
"It’s like they’re rinsing out this immense bath."
"We passed a boulangerie. ‘Look – French sticks!’"
"Our memories were deteriorating, and in recent years the effort required to recall a name or incident felt almost wearyingly physical, like clearing out an attic."
"Paris, then. Perhaps Paris in the spring might be the answer."
"I think it’s because they suspect that you’re not a native French speaker."
"I’d roam the country, undetected, blowing up bridges."
"Other people’s sex lives are a little like other people’s holidays: you’re glad that they had fun but you weren’t there."
"I once pointed out to Connie that she wouldn’t have taken me home if she’d been sober."
"For Christ’s sake, Douglas," she laughed. "For a PhD, you’re extremely dim."
"Cave paintings. Clay then bronze statues. Then for about 1,400 years, people painted nothing except bold but rudimentary pictures of either the Virgin Mary and Child or the Crucifixion."
"You don’t have to say anything. Just respond. Feel."
"I dread the day that Connie would see my Balham flat – the flat-pack furniture and bare magnolia walls, the comatose yucca plant, the all-too-prominent television."
"I can live wherever I want now. Except Portugal. I’m not allowed into Portugal, for reasons which I am not at liberty to divulge ..."
"Well, how else do you think it happened, Albie?"
"The back streets had opened out into an avenue, wide and dull and unpopulated."
"It’s not about what you liked and didn’t like, it’s about what it made you feel."
"If culture was improving then yes, I was improved."
"We could always do something else instead. Go to Paris, go to Amsterdam."
"It’s a terrible habit but a silence in a contained space makes me anxious, and so I tug and tug at the conversation as if struggling to start a lawnmower."
"I had decided to shake off last night’s ennui and enjoy myself by sheer effort of will."
"‘You’re full of fascinating observations,’ said Connie, laying down her novel with a sigh."
"I’ve just never really been that bothered about fiction."
"I’m not sure why we should be drawn to this material. Perhaps it’s because we like to imagine ourselves in the cataclysmic situations that our fathers and grandfathers faced."
"Alternative points of view are more easily appreciated from a distance."
"I think I can honestly say that I’ve never met a biochemist that I didn’t like."
"She was right, but I was too proud to go back past her."
"It was the first time anyone had said the words without some qualifying clause."
"In the Everglades of Florida, Albie is bitten by a snake that finds its way into his shoe, and I suck the venom from his filthy heel."
"The benefits for me were clear, but throughout our time together I had seen the question flicker across the faces of friends and waiters, family and taxi-drivers: what’s in it for her?"
"If you love someone, you bind them to you with heavy metal chains."
"Grief is as much regret for what we have never had as sorrow for what we have lost."
"If you live in a land where the roofs are made of pies, learn to pace yourself."
"It’s too hard, and it’s not a holiday if you feel chained to someone’s ankle."
"I’m pretty sure that, if I’d been around in the early Renaissance, I could have come up with the theory of perspective."
"In the face of the irrational demands and sudden furies, I adopted the persona of an attentive butler, thick-skinned, uncomplaining and able."
"Perhaps I should have taken Connie back there, to Kilburn Sainsbury’s. I’m sure we could have made it that far at least."
"It’s hard to stay sad or serene in the sweaty, bloody mess of that shocking business of birth."
"Who knows, perhaps if we can patch things up I can get Connie to fly over, and we can carry on with the Grand Tour."
"It’s a good experience to have, one is pleased to have succeeded, but it’s still not the best."
"I always thought that daughters were more forgiving of their fathers."
"I realised in that moment that I’d lost not just my son, but probably my wife too."
"Because surely, surely you have to succeed, if you give everything you have?"
"Hope had kept me awake for too long, and now, untroubled by the fantasy of a happy ending, I was finally able to fall into a sleep that was remarkable for the total absence of dreams."
"What was it about water against skin that caused the intestines to suddenly spasm and contract?"
"Was I an authoritarian? Certainly less so than my own father, and never unreasonably so."
"I wasn’t like that, it was not in my nature or upbringing."
"I did love my son, of course I did, but not when he tried to set fire to things."
"If I did overstep the mark sometimes, if I did lose my temper, snarl when I should have forced a smile then, well, I was very, very tired."
"I began to study science I had presumed, naïvely I suppose, that politicians would be falling over themselves to further human knowledge."
"So many of the great breakthroughs had first been glimpsed out of the corner of an eye."
"Apparently the nation’s future lay not in innovation and development but in global finance and telesales."
"I felt – is this common among new fathers, I wonder? – a new-found obligation to provide."
"Which is a noble sentiment, and a very Connie thing to say."
"Often – not always, but often – didn’t they equate to the same thing?"
"And Douglas? At least you tried. I’m grateful."
"A little before seven a.m. I was woken by a warder bearing an excellent cup of coffee."
"Would it kill you to put newspaper down first?"
"If the wind changes direction, you’ll stay that way."
"I imagined him racing off on a bicycle with fishing net and spotter’s guide."
"There weren’t enough pictures for the walls or books for the shelves."
"Everything you do, Dad, everything you say to me, there’s this … contempt, this constant stream of dislike and irritation."
"I think you’ll do great things in the future."
"I'm not going to have to wee on you, am I? Because that'd just be too Freudian and weird. That’s fifty years of therapy, right there."
"You’re insane. Look where the sun is! You need SPF30 at least."
"I've missed you. Oh God, I've missed you too."
"Perhaps we should talk about something else, Egg."
"I thought it was keyhole surgery. More Chubb than Yale."
"Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, Shaped to the comfort of the last to go."
"We have a wonderful son who is exactly as maddening and absurd as an eighteen-year-old boy should be, and he’s our son, ours, mine and yours now."