Victoria Clayton > Quotes

“An unhappy ending makes it literature rather than romantic fiction.”
― Victoria Clayton

“I think there is nothing more completely beautiful and more beautifully complete than walls lined with well-arranged books.”
― Victoria Clayton, Dance with Me

“Mark Anthony had established ascendance the day before by springing claws like flick knives and hissing like a maddened cobra. Dirk had rolled on his back and ratified the peace treaty before the ink was dry, like a dog of sense.”
― Victoria Clayton, Clouds Among the Stars

“It's hard to say why with some people you could talk all day and all night, while with others it's a struggle to find enough to say during a single course at diner.”
― Victoria Clayton, Clouds Among the Stars

“It is frightening to feel that all your happiness is bound up to another person. That without them you don't - you don't particularly want to live'.”
― Victoria Clayton, Clouds Among the Stars

“Cordelia glared at me. 'I expect if someone strapped you to table an swung an axe over your naked quivering flesh like The Pit and the Pendulum, you'd be correcting his grammar'.”
― Victoria Clayton, Clouds Among the Stars

“It does not matter how sternly you tell yourself that the crippling paranoia of the small hours of the night is due solely to body chemistry. You still feel absolutely miserable.”
― Victoria Clayton, Clouds Among the Stars

“It's hard to say why with some people you could talk all day and all night, while with others it's a struggle to find enough to say during a single course at dinner.”
― Victoria Clayton, Clouds Among the Stars

“The search for identity in one's youth is a journey of alternate boredom and agony interrupted by flash of joy.”
― Victoria Clayton

“But with Freddy I seemed to have the best sort of conversations, where our talk became exploratory and would lead on to new ideas, like thinking aloud, and in the process of clarifying improvisatory theories I always made useful discoveries about what I thought and felt.”
― Victoria Clayton, Clouds Among the Stars

“My mother had not acted for ten years. Not since a reviewer wrote that her portrayal of Lady Macbeth put him in mind of an exasperated society hostess burdened with unmannerly guests who had lost the new tennis balls, left the bathrooms in a mess, and finished the gin.”
― Victoria Clayton, Clouds Among the Stars

“Life is a merciless bully for children born into circumstances of grinding poverty, to unhappy families broken apart by crime, drugs, alcohol. It brutalises the affections, cramps the intellect, destroys aspiration.”
― Victoria Clayton, Clouds Among the Stars

“I found bossing other people about such a delightful novelty that I had to remind myself of Lord Acton's famous axiom about its tendency to corrupt.”
― Victoria Clayton, Clouds Among the Stars

“Such meticulousness was touching, as though Maggie poured into the house all the tenderness that was rebuffed by those she lived with.”
― Victoria Clayton, Clouds Among the Stars

“Though he had not done much, perhaps, to improve the lot of man, he had never added to the world's misery. He had never been unkind or discourteous or greedy or dishonest.”
― Victoria Clayton, Stormy Weather

“At parties I tend to get analytical, observing people rather than joining in'.”
― Victoria Clayton, Clouds Among the Stars

“What a pity, I reflected, that honesty in human relations is so rarely possible. We are compelled to approach, circle and retreat as though performing the steps of a complicated dance, neither trusting the appearance of truth not daring to speak it.”
― Victoria Clayton, Clouds Among the Stars

“There is nothing sexual about my interest in other women's breasts. But it's difficult not be curious when you have next to none of your own.”
― Victoria Clayton, Clouds Among the Stars

“This is the worst day of my life'. I groaned and put my head in my hands.
'You can't possibly know that. You might have something really awful going to happen to you later on. All your children burned to death or your nose cut off in a revolving door'.”
― Victoria Clayton, Clouds Among the Stars

“charmed the words out of”
― Victoria Clayton, Past Mischief

“How sick I am of thinking about money all the time. It's like and hideous disease destroying energy...contentment...joy...
(...)
It's depressing how money is always at the beginning and end of things.”
― Victoria Clayton, Stormy Weather

“He was undoubtedly a brute and a bastard and all those things she called him but there is a masochistic streak in many women that finds these indisputably grave faults not utterly repulsive when their package is darkly handsome.”
― Victoria Clayton, Stormy Weather

“The man who tells you nothing frightens him is whistling in the dark. Besides, fear is not necessarily bad. It may guard you from harm. And I suspect that fear of being caught, punished and disgraced keeps many more of us from committing crimes than does the voice of conscience'.”
― Victoria Clayton, Clouds Among the Stars

“You may as well attempt to colonise the moon with white mice as publish a volume of poetry'.”
― Victoria Clayton, Clouds Among the Stars

“His office led into a larger one in which two women of indeterminate age were attacking typewriters as though they were engaged in a race and the loser was to be executed the next morning.”
― Victoria Clayton, Clouds Among the Stars