Winter Quotes
"Life wasn’t yet dead. Revolution wasn’t dead. Racial equality wasn’t dead. Hatred wasn’t dead."
"Ghosts themselves weren’t dead, not exactly."
"You’ll catch your hair on fire, she said."
"The head shook its head. She laughed. Delightful."
"It’s very nice, having you around the house, she said. You’re very welcome."
"Nothing at all, the optician says. Because given that you’re over sixty, there’s no –"
"But the world order was changing and what was truly new, here and there, Charlotte said, was that the people in power were self-servers who’d no idea about and felt no responsibility towards history."
"Don’t be a silly wanker, the girl says."
"They don’t speak, he says. They haven’t spoken to each other for nearly three decades."
"A man barks at a woman. I mean barks like a dog. Woof woof."
"Afterwards, when the female MP complains, the male MP apologizes. He suggests it was lighthearted banter."
"It’s winter, still. There’s no snow. There’s been almost none all winter. It’ll be one of the warmest winters on record, again."
"I don’t know. All Dickens says in A Christmas Carol is that bye and bye they had a song, about a lost child travelling in the snow, from Tiny Tim; who had a plaintive little voice, and sang it very well indeed."
"He was one of the people who first identified Halley’s comet, one of the first to realize it wasn’t a different comet every time, which is what people had believed over the centuries, but was actually the same comet coming back to visit us again and again."
"Stop it, I said, the god says. The child shrugs. How? the child says."
"Sophia got up. She went downstairs. The young woman Arthur had brought with him was sitting at the kitchen table. She was halfway through a plate of scrambled eggs."
"If that woman had eaten that egg she’d be dying, and painfully, and soon, of food poisoning."
"Then, in his life after the war, he worked in finance. This gave him a range of more illogical but just as heady hatreds of particular races and ethnicities."
"I never gamble, Sophia said. You are a very wise woman, Charlotte Bain said."
"I’m sure your son’s already bored you with that story, Charlotte Bain said. I’m asking you to bore me with it, Sophia said."
"She did; she washed the pan, again with a degree of care and quietness."
"An eyelash fell off on to its cheek, then another, and between just the fall of each tiny lash the infant planet grew heavier, markedly so, pressing against her shoulderbone quite painfully."
"Well, The Wizard of Oz is partly in black and white anyway."
"In the middle of the night Art wakes up from a dream. In it he is being chased by giant monstrous flowers."
"We have undertaken this action because we believe that the nuclear arms race constitutes the greatest threat ever faced by the human race and our living planet."
"It was bigger than a banana but she swallowed the iguana."
"The house apparently has sixteen bedrooms though some of them have holes in their ceilings and one is lived in by birds who come through a hole in the rooftiles and are roosting in the room for the winter."
"It’s by no means the last time they’ll be seen as mythical."
"Things that look like they’ve got a history, reclaimed looking things. Or used to like buying, before they didn’t have the money to."
"You can buy yourself a pretend history for your house or yourself."
"She’s never let me use a computer of hers, not once. My whole life."
"Which means, you don’t play, you can’t win."
"There’s a sort of hole in my life, where the word father is."
"It’s not a personal memory I myself have, specifically, but it’s a good general sort of invented shareable memory."
"A military royal would never be so stupid and short sighted and blind."
"She’ll learn, Iris says. Give her time."
"She has unexpectedly had one of the best Christmases ever."
"I’m less a man who’ll relish a challenge, more a man who’ll challenge a relish."
"It’s like seeing inside and outside something at once."
"We think of ourselves, the protesters, as wakers of sleepers."
"They know without having to know anything that it’s us that are the throwaways."
"Where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we’re supposed to be seeing."
"There’s a hole in your fence, dear Major, dear Major."