Stig Abell > Quotes

“You get to sit by yourself, listen to music and read a book. It must be heaven.”
― Stig Abell, What to read next. How to make books part of your life.

“reading for me is one of the central facets of existence. I cannot spend a day without a book. I have – in common with everybody – regular moments of mental unrest, roiling disquiet, uncertainty and anxiety. I manage them with a sedative, an analgesic: the escape into worlds created by other people. The invention of the novel, it seems to me, is one of the true triumphs of human endeavour. It codifies something magnificent within all of us: the act of empathy. When we read, we forge a connection with an author, and often then a common culture or tradition that is greater than us. Reading is an act of enlarging, of expansion. It makes our ‘I’ bigger than just ourselves; it stretches our sense of identity and experience.”
― Stig Abell, What to read next. How to make books part of your life.

“There’s a lot of lonely, desperate people round here. Shit, I’m sometimes one of them. But these men that still live at home, frustrated, a bit unsure of themselves as men, they are terrible with women…”
― Stig Abell, Death Under a Little Sky

“Space is a luxury, he thinks. Not just for a house, but for each moment of your waking life. He had lived in this place, cramped close to others, compressing himself into the smallness of whatever was available, without the feeling the strain of it, without recognizing the shrinkage. But now it all seems so unbearable. The tyranny of proximity.”
― Stig Abell, Death Under a Little Sky

“Doom-mongers are generally sexier than bright-eyed gushers, but should not be trusted more. And,”
― Stig Abell, How Britain Really Works: Understanding the Ideas and Institutions of a Nation

“Pavane for a Dead Princess by Maurice Ravel Ave Maria S. 558 by Franz Liszt Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saens Guitar Concerto in D Major by Antonio Vivaldi”
― Stig Abell, Death in a Lonely Place

“narrative. The beginning of the rule of law4 – it is often said, and is largely true – in Britain coincides with the signing by King John of the Magna Carta (the Big Charter)5 in 1215. This has two key chapters, which make clear that a person cannot be punished without due process, and that such a process cannot be bought, delayed or denied. These are critical principles in our judicial system today. As it happens, Magna Carta was in force for precisely two months (when Pope Innocent III annulled it on the grounds it had been obtained by compulsion, calling it ‘illegal, unjust, harmful to royal rights and shameful to the English people’), and did not directly lead to modern jury trials in any significant way. As an articulation of principles of justice, it owed much to existing texts, such as the coronation oaths of Anglo-Saxon kings and the law codes of Henry I. The Pope also called Magna Carta ‘void of all validity forever’. He was wrong. It has survived as both a romantic gesture and a useful precedent6 to cite as our courts became more professional and individual rights became more established. The more significant, but less heralded, legal development came a couple of centuries later with the articulation of the principle of habeas corpus. The full phrase is habeas corpus ad subjiciendum: ‘may you bring the body before the court’, which sounds pompous or funereal. What it means, though, is that everyone has a right to be tried in person before being imprisoned. If someone is held by the state without trial, a petition using this phrase should get them either freed or at least their status interrogated by a judge. Two Latin words contain the most effective measure against tyranny in existence. As time progressed in this country, then, we see”
― Stig Abell, How Britain Really Works: Understanding the Ideas and Institutions of a Nation

“Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber Symphony Number 5 by Gustav Mahler “O mio babbino caro” from Giannia Schicchi by Puccini The Spruce, Op. 75 by Jean Sibelius Appalachian Spring by Aaron Copeland New World Symphony by Antonin Dvorak Piano Concerto in A Minor by Edvard Grieg Mephisto Waltz by Franz Liszt Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major by Johann Sebastian Bach Cello Sonata in G Minor, Op. 65 by Frederic Chopin”
― Stig Abell, Death in a Lonely Place

“The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet Aristotle (384–322 BC) An attentive reader will notice the connection between health and education (improvements in the latter leading to benefits in the former).”
― Stig Abell, How Britain Really Works: Understanding the Ideas and Institutions of a Nation

“That is the problem[,] it seems to me[,] with self-consciously ‘literary’ fiction: it values difficulty as a quality, where it is really a disadvantage. What I call the ‘eat your vegetables’ approach to writing, publishing and criticism: yes, the prose is hard to get through, but you’ll feel the benefits later. Fiction should never be merely fibrous. Greatness, it seems to me, is always readily accessible to the mind.”
― Stig Abell, Things I learned on the 6:28: A Commuter's Guide to Reading

“Mark Twain said, supposedly: a classic book is something that everybody wants to have read but nobody wants to read.”
― Stig Abell, Things I learned on the 6:28: A Commuter's Guide to Reading

“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia”
― Stig Abell, How Britain Really Works: Understanding the Ideas and Institutions of a Nation