Gilbert Adair > Quotes

“My little Matthew, Isabelle at once snapped back at him, when two people agree, it means one of them is redundant”
― Gilbert Adair, The Dreamers

“There is fire and fire: The fire that burns and the fire that gives warmth, a fire that sets a forest ablaze and the fire that puts a cat to sleep. So is it with self-love. The member that once seemed one of the wonders of the world soon becomes as homely as an old slipper. Mathew and himself gradually ceased to excite each other.”
― Gilbert Adair, The Dreamers

“You read Salinger in Italian? Molto chic’
‘I was told a good way to learn a language was to read translations of books you know by heart’
‘That’s interesting.’
But Isabelle wasn’t at all interested. She had just discovered a new expression. She savoured it amorously. From now on everything that once has been "sublime" – a film, a Worth gown, a Coromandel screen – would be "molto chic". Like those devotees of the increase-your-word-power column in the Reader’s Digest who stake their conversational reputation on the number of times in a single day they find room for "plethora" and "infelicity" and "quintessential", dropping these words the way other people drop names, she hated to let any amusing phrase go once it had caught her fancy.”
― Gilbert Adair, The Dreamers

“And my Black bird, still not quitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On that pallid bust -- still flitting through my dolorous domain;
But it cannot stop from gazing for it truly finds amazing
That, by artful paraphrasing, I such rhyming can sustain--
Notwithstanding my lost symbol I such rhyming still sustain--
Though I shan't try it again!”
― Gilbert Adair, A Void

“Love is blind but not deaf.”
― Gilbert Adair

“- ძვირფასო მეთიუ, - უთხრა იზაბელმა, - თუ საუბრისას ორი ადამიანი ერთმანეთს მუდამ ეთანხმება, მაშინ ერთ-ერთი ზედმეტია.”
― Gilbert Adair, The Dreamers

“He was also terrified that he hadn't properly read the small print of their relationship. He forgot that true friendship is a contract in which there can be no small print.”
― Gilbert Adair

“Saying no, I thought, that has always been my forte, and no wonder, given that the stupidity of the world is rivalled only by its ugliness.”
― Gilbert Adair, Love and Death on Long Island

“Could that be why brother and sister slept together in perfect impunity, a Romeo and Juliet starcrossed not because they belonged to two families but to a single one?”
― Gilbert Adair, The Dreamers

“When you keep someone waiting you give him time to count up your faults.”
― Gilbert Adair, The Dreamers

“AMOUR AMER A MARRE A MORT”
― Gilbert Adair, Innocents

“A lonely man thinks of nothing but friendship, just as a repressed man thinks of nothing but flesh.”
― Gilbert Adair, The Dreamers

“For monks is what we are, my dear Matthew, monks who enter literature with our heads bowed, as if taking religious orders. It's as simple as that. The poet for whom the subject, the only conceivable subject, is art itself -- and for the true poet, I tell you, there can be no other subject -- such a poet is a monk whose whole life coincides with the adoration of his God and for whom posterity is his Heaven. You' -- he stressed the you -- 'you know what I mean, don't you? The immorality of his soul. For what /is an oeuvre, after all, but the soul of its creator? That's why I chuckle so at the antics of those pathetic buffers in the Academy with their pretensions to immortality. Les Immortels, hah! Maurois, Achard, Druon, Genevoix, that crowd! What a graveyard, Matthew, n'est-ce pas? Dead is what they are, dead, not immortal, dead as writers, mummified as men, propped up in their fauteuils like so many old codgers in wheelchairs. What a farce! Hein? And, you know, you know, it has just occurred to me, it has just this instant occurred to me, that true immortality, the immortality of Racine, of Montaigne, qu'est-ce que j'en sais, of Rimbaud, is to the Immortality of the Académie Française what Heaven is to -- to the Vatican. Hein? For that's what it is, the Academy, the Vatican of French literature.”
― Gilbert Adair, The Dreamers

“The implication of her turn of phrase, as Matthew knew, wasn't to be taken seriously. But, like all sufferers from unrequited love, he had ceased to be particular. The words had been said. For that he was grateful. For his nocturnal reveries, for the postmortem of each day that he conducted night after night, it was all that mattered.”
― Gilbert Adair, The Dreamers

“...like a swan and its reflection on the surface of a lake.”
― Gilbert Adair, The Dreamers

“the English garden presented the reverse side of the tapestry, with rough, clotted textures, knots like fists and colours all running together.”
― Gilbert Adair, The Dreamers

“...to preserve the memory of that very first morning as, in its pristine state, unwrinkled by projection, one preserves the negative of a film.”
― Gilbert Adair, The Dreamers

“So, amid all the laughter and the steam, the Trenet record, the unwound clocks, the veiled curtains, the teasing and banter, the dewy, mildewy glamour of a swimming-pool in whose stagnant atmosphere the flat was bathed, the days passed, jubilant and implacable, days divided by nights as two frames of film are divided by a black strip.”
― Gilbert Adair, The Dreamers

“Before you can change the world, you must understand that you yourself are part of it. You can not stand outside, looking in.”
― Gilbert Adair, The Dreamers