The Only Story Quotes
"Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question."
"Most of us have only one story to tell. This is mine."
"Do all these retellings bring you closer to the truth of what happened, or move you further away?"
"The most vulnerable spot in doubles is always down the middle."
"But there’s only one that matters, only one finally worth telling."
"What you have to understand, Paul, is that we’re a played-out generation."
"Love’s elastic. It’s not a question of watering down. It adds on. It doesn’t take away."
"Things aren’t what they look like, Paul. That’s about the only lesson I can teach you."
"At first all this seemed stylish and idiosyncratic. I was initially seduced, then slowly disenchanted."
"Property announces a way of life, with a subtle insistence on that way of life continuing."
"Property also demands constant attention and maintenance: it’s like a physical manifestation of the marriage that exists within it."
"But I could see, all too well, that Susan had not been the recipient of constant attention and maintenance."
"Everyone had their own love story. I was happy for everyone else to be or have been blessed."
"First love fixes a life forever: this much I have discovered over the years."
"It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence."
"Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love."
"The way each sex blubbingly admitted that, for all the other’s faults, they still needed one another."
"The way men sat in armchairs with their legs apart and their privates heavily outlined against their trousers."
"The way women pretended that, regardless of the accumulated sexual folklore, they were the ones who had the common sense."
"I didn’t realise that there was panic inside her. How could I have guessed? I thought it was just inside me."
"The expected scandal failed to break... by a very English combination of ignorance, true or feigned, and embarrassment."
"Our expulsion might not have been an Obstacle on which Passion Thrives, but the moral and social condemnation... acted as an authentication of our love."
"She once said that she wouldn’t necessarily have gone to bed with me if it hadn’t been for the known fact that it was bad for a man not to have 'sexual release.'"
"Perhaps it was more ignorance than innocence. Or call it folk wisdom; or patriarchal propaganda."
"But there is panic and pandemonium waiting to break out inside all of us, of this I am convinced."
"It’s a condition of our mortality. We have codes of manners to allay and minimise it, jokes and routines, and so many forms of diversion and distraction."
"I keep saying that I was nineteen. But sometimes, in what I’ve told you so far, I was twenty or twenty-one."
"You realise that you want official interference into other people’s lives but not into your own."
"In love, everything is both true and false; it’s the one subject on which it’s impossible to say anything absurd."
"The strange thing is, part of you feels exhilarated by it."
"An image comes into your head one day, an image of your relationship to one another."
"You remember, at school, being guided by masters through books and plays in which there was often a Conflict between Love and Duty."
"He fell in love like a man committing suicide."
"There is her shame to deal with. But there is also, he knew, his shame."
"He found that he simply couldn’t go on. He couldn’t save her, and so he had to save himself."
"The question of responsibility? That seemed a matter for outsiders."
"Either I’ll die and break her heart or she’ll die and break mine. Not much of a choice, is it?"
"Life is a cross section, memory is a split down the grain, and memory follows it all the way to the end."
"To say sincerely that you are happy is to be happy."
"Every love, happy or unhappy, is a real disaster once you give yourself over to it entirely."
"Life is beautiful but sad" or "Life is sad but beautiful"?
"Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition; it could only ever be captured in a story."
"From love’s absolutism to love’s absolution? No: I don’t believe in the cosy narratives of life some find necessary."
"Getting through the first sixteen years or so was fundamentally a question of damage limitation."