Moon Tiger Quotes
"In life as in history the unexpected lies waiting, grinning from around corners. Only with hindsight are we wise about cause and effect."
"I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates."
"Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms."
"We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard."
"Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover."
"We do not remember childhood – we imagine it."
"I control the world so long as I can name it. Which is why children must chase language before they do anything else, tame the wilderness by describing it, challenge God by learning His hundred names."
"If you bite your fingernails no one will want to marry you, Granny says."
"You have to love someone very much before you marry them."
"God," she says, "is an unprincipled bastard, wouldn't you agree?"
"I would never have agreed to Lisa being christened."
"Who else could bugger things up so effectively?"
"But I simply watch you, knowing what I know. Knowing what you do not know."
"Twice in my life have I prayed, and a fat lot of good it did me."
"Churches have always seemed to me almost irrefutable evidence."
"I can bear it no longer. Let him not be dead."
"A girl, perhaps, a young woman even – but that hardening of the features, that softening of the body, that hint that time past is levelling up with time ahead … dear me, no."
"I have seen war; in that sense I have been present at wars."
"I’ve grown old with the century; there’s not much left of either of us."
"We sat holding hands and staring out of the window and it was like looking at a picture."
"Let’s not think it," says Claudia. "Give it a more respectable name. Fate. Life. That sort of stuff."
"An hour can seem like a day or a day like an hour."
"History is true and that unfortunately you are a part of it."
"We are preserved in forms that we do not like in the recollection of others."
"The rest of us grow old and tell each other what really happened."
"You can never be sure where the mind of a historian is: down some byway of the past, in the records of the Umayyads, the councils of Trent, the palaces at Versailles."
"One of the points when the immunity is shown up as fantasy."
"I want stability. I want to live in one place. I want to make plans for next year and the one after that and the one after that."
"It is no longer prowling on the perimeter, like some large unpredictable animal that she is safely watching from afar, whose doings are of scientific interest. It has come right up close and is howling at her bedroom door."
"The vision of the Fourth Dynasty is as irretrievable as the vision of one’s own childhood."
"Don’t think about it. However it was it is over now. However it was or wherever it was. He is not lying there any more. He is nowhere now. Nowhere at all. Don’t think about it."
"Is nausea always a manifestation of grief? Who am I to know? I have never been thus before. Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into something else."
"The aftermath of war is disorder. An example, incidentally, of the misuse of language: aftermath is a decent agricultural term, it has a precise meaning – the aftermath is the second crop of grass which appears after the mowing of the first. The aftermath of war should, correctly, be another war; it usually is."
"Incest is closely related to narcissism. When Gordon and I were at our most self-conscious – afire with the sexuality and egotism of late adolescence – we looked at each other and saw ourselves translated."
"Greed is an interesting quality. Jasper is greedy; he has to have money for its own sake – not just for what it can buy but as pure possession: figures on pieces of paper."
"History is disorder, I wanted to scream at them – death and muddle and waste. And here you sit cashing in on it and making patterns in the sand."
"The victory, in a way, is of one mythology over another. The Aztec – Prescott’s ‘untutored savage’ – has to cope with gods who require continual appeasement if day is to succeed day and the sun is to go on shining."
"It enlarges me, it frees me from the prison of my experience; it also resounds within that experience."
"The life of an attractive woman is different from that of a plain one."
"Ignorance. Immodesty. Hubris. And fate, of course."
"We all act as hinges – fortuitous links between other people."
"I have never got used to the fact that they have brown spots all over them. They look to me like someone else's, to be frank."
"Publicly, I behaved like a rational responsible being – I argued the pros and cons of unilateralism, I wrote my column, I marched and demonstrated when I felt it appropriate."
"My body has conditioned things, to some extent."
"The world is no safer than it was twenty years ago. But we are still here; the monster has been contained, so far – with every year that passes the hope grows that it might continue to be contained, somehow."
"I never expected to see Lisa grow up. For years, when she was a child, I waited for the Bomb to drop."
"We expect Armageddon; the Bible has trained us well. We assume either annihilation or salvation, perhaps both."
"The notion that things go on forever is recent, and evidently too recent to attract much of a following."
"One resents being axed from the narrative, apart from anything else. I’d have liked to know the outcome."
"It is given unto economists to interfere with the narrative, in their small way."
"I love you, she thinks. Always have. More than I’ve loved anyone, bar one."
"History is grey stuff. Products. Systems of government. Climates of opinion. It moves slowly."
"I am separate from him now. No day passes in which I do not think of him, but I can do so with detachment."
"In the beginning there was myself; my own body set the frontiers, physical and emotional, there was simply me and not-me."
"The past is true, which both appals and uplifts me. I need it; I need you, Gordon, Jasper, Lisa, all of them."
"Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing."