Barbara Trapido > Quotes

“It's a showy habit I've got," I say. "To be always quoting poetry and stuff. Some of us use our brains, and some of us use our memories.”
― Barbara Trapido, Brother of the More Famous Jack

“She could surely rise to a dishwasher, but she prefers to use her children. She believes that a row of children chopping vegetables is a better thing than a machine.”
― Barbara Trapido, Brother of the More Famous Jack

“I am in general susceptible to style.”
― Barbara Trapido, Brother of the More Famous Jack

“I think that before he turned and walked away from me I said that I was sorry. In this life there are those that apologise and those that do not. I am a person who says sorry if a passer-by stands on my foot.”
― Barbara Trapido, Brother of the More Famous Jack

“forgive me, since this isn’t my cabbage patch”
― Barbara Trapido, Brother of the More Famous Jack

“Now we have a humanist’s despair before the News,”
― Barbara Trapido, Brother of the More Famous Jack

“engage Rosie and”
― Barbara Trapido, Brother of the More Famous Jack

“Here I am,' he said to himself, on that first day. 'A born-again vegetarian Zulu with a fake French passport and a pocket full of dollars'.”
― Barbara Trapido, Sex and Stravinsky

“I pictured myself sitting by the fire and knitting the Celtic mists and shadowy pools into my cloth. I pictured Jonathan getting up from his typewriter and going out to split wood like a man in Ingmar Bergman, and the child, with woollen mittens flapping at its cuffs, tottering after him.”
― Barbara Trapido, Brother of the More Famous Jack

“How could I put across to him how it was with me? How much I was driven timorously by a desire to please and yet found myself stubbornly unable to do so by obedience to any values but my own? Since my values were not shared by those around me, I couldn't possibly win.”
― Barbara Trapido

“¿Qué es la vida sino el tránsito de las espinillas a las arrugas en pos de la sabiduría?”
― Barbara Trapido, Brother of the More Famous Jack

“He was clad in stylish pale linen and had a squashy packet of Gallic fags jutting from his breast pocket.”
― Barbara Trapido, Brother of the More Famous Jack

“He gains strength from the myth of his wife’s incompetence.”
― Barbara Trapido, Brother of the More Famous Jack

“You may produce lunch two hours late, but you make it worth the eating, Janie.”
― Barbara Trapido, Brother of the More Famous Jack

“It had ceased to bother me that Michele didn't believe a word that I said. It gave me the liberty to lie whenever I chose.”
― Barbara Trapido, Brother of the More Famous Jack