Charles Palliser > Quotes

“To exist is to be betrayed, since we exist for others only by virtue of what we betray of ourselves to them.”
― Charles Palliser, Betrayals: A Novel

“I said: I don’t ever find people uninteresting. On the contrary, I find them so fascinating and so highly-flavoured that after small helpings, I have to go away and chew them slowly and analyse the taste of them.”
― Charles Palliser, Rustication

“Such people are their own punishment.”
― Charles Palliser, Rustication

“If his nose were a tail he would be the perfect image of a sow’s rear end.”
― Charles Palliser, Rustication

“I saw an infinity of such dreary evenings stretching out ahead of me. Trapped in a dirty old house with a grieving old woman and an irritable young one. And with only the books I had brought with me, most of which were still in my trunk anyway.”
― Charles Palliser, Rustication

“When you love, you entrust to that person your sense of your own worth, and if that person throws you aside, you believe profoundly and utterly that it is because you are worthless. That is a kind of death.”
― Charles Palliser, The Unburied

“Some people have a talent for being happy and others appear to find unhappiness almost as if they sought it.”
― Charles Palliser, The Unburied

“We only value ourselves as others value us, for it might be said that we hold ourselves in trust for others.”
― Charles Palliser, The Unburied

“The greatest actors can create a human being before the very eyes of spectators – not show them something beforehand like a puppet. To go out onto the stage and become the character at a moment of crisis and speak without knowing what you are going to say until the words come out! To court that danger and to triumph, that is the great adventure that life offers. The incomparable adventure. Don’t you see that?”
― Charles Palliser, The Unburied

“Happiness ... is much more than merely the absence of misery.”
― Charles Palliser, The Unburied

“To think of what he must have done to have inflicted so much damage /.../. It was hard to believe. It was hard to believe anything good about out species. Was this what we were - cruel apes who wore clothes and washed and perfumed our bodies?”
― Charles Palliser, The Unburied

“One sees more clearly in the fog because one has to look harder.”
― Charles Palliser, The Unburied

“Yes, Jonnie," Emma said. "Extraordinary as it seems, it was mere coincidence that brought you to our door. It's the sort of thing that you expect to find only in a novel — and only when you know the author has been too idle to work it out any better.”
― Charles Palliser, The Quincunx

“There are people who invite betrayal. They are demanding towards themselves and don't realize how hard they are on other people. They make it difficult for others not to fail them. And in some cases they even take a grim pleasure from being let down.”
― Charles Palliser, The Unburied

“We don’t exist in and for ourselves but only in as much as we are re-created in the imagination of another person— by entering that person’s life as fully as possible. I mean, entering it imaginatively, intellectually, physically and emotionally with all the conflicts that that makes inevitable.”
― Charles Palliser, The Unburied

“When a crime is investigated, the explanation that is adopted is not the one that best accounts for all the circumstances, but the one that best serves the purposes of those carrying out the investigation.”
― Charles Palliser, The Unburied