Claire Tomalin > Quotes

“Poor Nelly, she was not to know that fashions in sin change as much as other fashions.”
― Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman

“He could take on anything and everything, it seemed, rather than leave himself time to reflect on his dissatisfaction with his life and what he might do about it.”
― Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens

“He saw the world more vividly than other people, and reacted to what he saw with laughter, horror, indignation, and sometimes sobs.”
― Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens

“She was the sort of person whose mood preceded her into the room whenever she arrived, an extra presence that could not be ignored.”
― Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

“Being himself was more exhausting than impersonating a stage character.”
― Claire Tomalin

“He could no longer believe, but he cherished the memory of belief, and especially the centrality and beauty of Christian ritual in country life, and what it had meant to earlier generations and still meant to some.”
― Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy

“You can’t read these pages without being moved as Pepys becomes one with the crowd and its excitement and relief at Monck’s determination to break the political deadlock, and at the same time impressed by his capacity to watch, listen and take in everything. The entry may look as though it wrote itself, but the effects are worked with skill, the rhythm of the long unpunctuated sentences leading you through the streets, their momentum occasionally broken by natural pauses to drink, observe or talk. The three pieces of direct speech that do punctuate the passage raise the sense of immediacy, the warning to Haslerig, the greeting to Monck and the ‘God bless them’s of the people to the soldiers.”
― Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

“He left a trail like a meteor, and everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens.”
― Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens

“Mary Wollstonecraft was the first person to apply the phrase 'legal prostitution' to marriage.”
― Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

“He has the good reporter’s gift for being in the right place at the right moment, and the structure and rhythm of his sentences show how well he has mastered his medium.”
― Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

“Gurdjieff's creed was that civilisation had thrown men and women out of balance, so that the physical, the emotional and the intellectual parts had ceased to work in accord. It is an idea that appeals to many people, and, indeed, has an obvious element of truth to it. Whether Gurdjieff's methods for righting the internal balance of his disciples had much, or any, merit is another matter. Since the whole thing depended on his personality, and made no scientific claims (as psychoanalysis did) or cosmological and moral claims (as most brands of Christianity did), it remained an amateur, ramshackle affair, and although Gurdjieff aroused passionate hate as well as love, his system seems to have done little lasting damage, and obviously allowed some people to change direction in a way that seemed helpful to them.”
― Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life

“The season of domestic goodwill and festivity must have posed a problem to all good Victorian family men with more than one family to take care of, particularly when there were two lots of children to receive the demonstrations of paternal love.”
― Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman

“cherish the beauty and sadness of autumn.”
― Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life

“My life was a sort of series of random disasters.”
― Claire Tomalin

“A whim did not provide a living.”
― Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

“He has the good reporter’s gift for being in the right place at the right moment, and the structure and rhythm of his sentences show how well he has mastered his medium. After”
― Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

“He then fell into the state of apprehension and despondency usual to writers as they wait for a verdict on their work.”
― Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man

“My mother told me early that whatever happens to you, however unhappy you may be, you can escape into a book.”
― Claire Tomalin, A Life of My Own: A Memoir

“The most striking aspect of Jane's adult letters is their defensiveness. They lack tenderness towards herself as much as towards others ... They are the letters of someone who does not open her heart'. They are also, perhaps, the letters of someone who doesn't dare open her heart, for fear of what she might find there.”
― Claire Tomalin

“If we beat the king ninety and nine times, yet he is king still and so will his posterity be after him; but if the king beat us once, we shall all be hanged, and our posterity made slaves.”
― Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

“The excitement in London gave no guarantees about the future, and he still committed himself to no direct expression of opinion in his Diary.”
― Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

“Dostoevsky introduced Dickens’s words with his own: The person he [the writer] sees most of, most often, actually every day, is himself. When it comes to a question of why a man does something else, it’s the author’s own actions which make him understand, or fail to understand, the sources of human action. Dickens told me the same thing when I met him at the office of his magazine . . . in 1862. He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Only two people? I asked.”
― Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life

“Pepys was a good scholar, able to read Latin for pleasure all his life; and that very skill may have helped to leave his English free and uncluttered for the Diary, the language of life as opposed to the elaborately constructed formulations of the classroom and study.”
― Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

“This is businesslike stuff, but he also lets us feel how his own awareness of the importance of the day through which he is living expands and permeates everything as the hours go by:”
― Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

“Fiction can accommodate ambivalence as polemic cannot”
― Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life