Lessons Quotes
"The piano was a school thing, or dark, like a pine forest in winter, exclusive to him, his private labyrinth of cold sorrow."
"He heard no easy rippling. Her perfume overwhelmed his senses and deafened him."
"The mistake was coming towards him, arms outstretched like a mother, ready to scoop him up, always the same mistake coming to collect him without the promise of a kiss."
"Together, they listened to the bad notes fade into the hissing silence."
"They concealed from you the boundaries of your ignorance."
"In a hot three-week drought that had begun in July he could have saved it, despite the hosepipe ban. But he had been too busy to haul full buckets the garden's length."
"What happened, whatever it was, must be his fault and disobedience was against his nature."
"He knew everything about him, where he was in every minute, in every place. He was the baby's bed and his god."
"Here was the impression of her finger and thumb, her signature, a written record of the moment that made it true."
"The Third Secretary at the Russian embassy in Stockholm had been dispatched to ask Swedish authorities how to deal with a graphite fire."
"A gene isn't a thing. It's an idea. An idea about information. A fingerprint is a thing, a trace."
"The world seemed minimally more reasonable. Here, after all, at the top of the stairs was a pile for the washing machine."
"A butterfly, a peacock, was sunning itself on the brickwork."
"The past was often a conduit from memory to restless fantasising."
"He would know him less well, then even less."
"The closest he could come to sleep now was to lie on his back, eyes closed, listening out for Lawrence."
"He was waiting for existence to part like a curtain, for a hand to extend and help him step through into a paradise regained."
"The rupture of routine, the excitement of danger mixed with an exaggerated sense of security, hours of unsupervised play with his chums."
"It seemed to him then, as the ambulances receded with their distant sirens sounding, that everything worked, and was decent and caring and just."
"The necessary illusion was that the best poem ever written was within his reach."
"We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you alone!"
"Nothing is so dishonourable in a civilised nation as to permit itself to be ‘governed’ without resistance by a reckless clique that has surrendered to depraved instinct."
"The government’s ‘most despicable crimes—crimes that massively outstrip every human standard…Never forget that all citizens deserve the regime they are willing to endure…our current state is the dictatorship of evil."
"I’m Keith Pitman and I’m going to be a cosmetic dentist."
"You cannot continue to meander. Assume she is not coming back. Correct. Then what? Then…"
"He could go out into the garden now and pay tribute to his freedoms of the past, and raise a glass. But he didn’t move."
"She must have thought that it would give her parents some comfort to see her eat the present they had brought, just before she was led away."
"Up until that time they had owned whoever they were, whatever they did. Now, little bits of their lives were beginning to fall away."
"What hope then for a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, living in a time and culture and crowded circumstances that did not encourage self-knowledge?"
"The Greeks were right to invent their gods as argumentative unpredictable punitive members of a lofty elite."
"The mind, the daily variations in mood of his young self were impenetrable at this distance."
"Youth is the demon that sustains him. Curious, resilient, savage in its hunger for experience."
"No time to waste. Now you might make out a self, apart and alone, to face your own judgement."
"The outward colouring is mostly what remains of childhood."
"The problem was greater than his own. Another of her children had been sent away without her protests."
"Nothing forces public events on private lives like a war."
"If Hitler had not invaded Poland... Roland would not exist."
"The only happiness and purpose and proper paradise was sexual."
"His torment was in knowing how eccentric he was."
"The shift in mood was responsible for a minor decision that would transform his life."
"She’s jealous of me. She got wartime London then marriage and childcare."
"We have to forgive the fathers or we’ll go mad."
"What mattered was that he had been forgiven."
"It’s a big counterculture, easy to disappear."
"We took the baby for a walk in Battersea Park in the afternoon. When we came back he slept. You wanted sex. I didn’t."
"Each time he visited the Mounts’ house, not much bigger than his own, he noticed an improvement, a shift to greater comfort."
"I want you to leave school. I want you in my bed."
"She worked in the typing pool at a government ministry."
"I’m living my mother’s life, retracing its pattern exactly. Some literary ambition, then love, then marriage, then baby."
"The lapidary prose, the high-flying digressions offered up to the ghost of George Eliot, whom Catherine admires."
"If she didn’t know the Foreign Secretary, she would know people who could help."
"I’m not Alissa’s close friend. Lover, or how you say it. I’m her, uh, scheisse, Verleger?"
"He was beginning to make a discovery about himself. Or it was a discovery about sex?"
"Everything else was pointless. This was the rhythm, inwards, outwards, like breathing."
"The world was brimming with pointless endeavour."
"The boredom of a fifteen-year-old can be as refined as Portuguese gold filigree."
"There was nothing he could do about any of it. What he wanted was coming towards him, but so slowly."
"When he saw her for the first time, she was a revelation."
"He couldn’t even hold himself to playing right through the easiest of the Two-Part Inventions."
"Love is all about chance and good luck."
"How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events."
"On a windy sunlit midweek morning she cleanly transformed her existence."
"Marrying Daphne because everyone said it was a good idea would not be a break from his past but a continuation."
"The old life, he and Lawrence together here in the little house as before."
"The years slid over old deaths like a heavy lid."
"Your leftier-than-thou stuff makes me vomit."
"The voters you claim to care about don’t agree. You must think they’re idiots."
"The music fitted around wherever his fingers happened to be."
"To achieve what she did she had to leave us."
"His apparent distraction or incipient madness that night gave him immunity."
"Do we forgive or ignore their single-mindedness or cruelty in the service of their art?"
"Men wanted everything—children, success, women's selfless devotion to male creativity."
"To be left for the cause of mediocre work would be the ultimate insult."
"Our hearts rejoice. God in all His glory take care of you."
"She was a busy woman, capable of keeping him and his problems at arm's length."
"She’s like a lot of brilliant writers. There’s something naive, you know?"
"The travel and tourist routines in a lively city began to weary her and she longed for home."
"I was amazed by how fit he was, the speed he made me take that ascent."
"I can’t tell you, Roland, what a joy it was to hear him say that."
"She remembered how pleased she was to have him to herself."
"Need to pull over," he murmured. "Something in my eye."
"Poor Queen of the Night. She hits those top notes, but she knows she’s going to lose."
"I don’t want you or the kids to be doing this. Too grim."
"He was an extremely reserved man. I’d never heard him use the word love."
"Getting all the children here at the same time would be hopeless."
"The paradox was, Roland thought, that all this preparation—phase two—was a way of not thinking about what lay immediately ahead."
"He did not doubt that Lawrence would have something rational and comforting to say."
"Their unit pushed further east, further from home he had written letters to Daphne’s mother."
"It’s in the national unconscious," he had tried to explain to his German friend. "We feel we’ve already left you. We no longer catch your European diseases."
"We’re still here and we haven’t got long. Me especially. I thought we could eat and get drunk together and remember everything that was good."
"Life is messy, everybody makes mistakes because we’re all fucking stupid."
"I’ve torn this one from the record. How did I get out?"
"I never got you out of my hair. Ever. If I had you wouldn’t be here. Please believe me."
"We were both in pain and your mother was calling up the stairs that lunch was ready."
"I’m scared and I’m ashamed…of what I did, and of how I kept it up for so long."
"It could surprise you, just as today surprised me."
"I’m done. I have a novella to write, then I’ll sit here and wait."
"Dying of suffocation without family or friends, tended by overworked strangers in masks, was worse."
"I did what everybody did: noted that the days were passing too fast."
"Silence, solitude, pointlessness, perpetual dusk."