Jonathan Coe > Quotes

“I like the rain before it falls. of course there is no such thing, she said. That's why it's my favorite. Something can still make you happy, can't it, even if it isn't real.”
― Jonathan Coe, The Rain Before It Falls

“Some people don't realize that a straight 'No' can be the kindest answer in the world.”
― Jonathan Coe, The Dwarves of Death

“Sometimes I feel that I am destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs. That God has made me the victim of some cosmic practical joke, by assigning me little more than a walk-on part in my own life. Or sometimes I feel that my role is simply to be a spectator to other people's stories, and always to wander away at the most important moment, drifiting into the kitchen to make a cup of tea just as the denouement unfolds.”
― Jonathan Coe, The Rotters' Club

“Objectivity is just male subjectivity.”
― Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep

“Yes - I've learned from my mistakes, and I'm sure I could repeat them perfectly.”
― Jonathan Coe, The Closed Circle

“I don't mind summer rain. In fact I like it. It's my favourite sort.' 'Your favourite sort of rain?' said Thea. I remember that she was frowning, and pondering these words, and then she announced: 'Well, I like the rain before it falls.”
― Jonathan Coe, The Rain Before it Falls

“The plain fact is that she never really liked me, and never wanted me. I had been a mistake; and that, to some extent, is what I remain in my own eyes, to this day. The knowledge never goes, can never be undone. You just have to find a way to live with it.”
― Jonathan Coe

“[...] words are tricky little bastards, and very rarely say what you want them to say [...]”
― Jonathan Coe, The Accidental Woman

“I was going to say 'my friend Stuart', but I suppose he's not a friend any more. I seem to have lost a number of friends in the last few years. I don't mean that I've fallen out with them, in any dramatic way. We've just decided not to stay in touch. And that's what it's been: a decision, a conscious decision, because it's not difficult to stay in touch with people nowadays, there are so many different ways of doing it. But as you get older, I think that some friendships start to feel increasingly redundant. You just find yourself asking, "What's the point?" And then you stop.”
― Jonathan Coe, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim

“We say, ‘Shall we meet for a drink?’, as though drinking were the main end of the appointment, and the matter of company only incidental, we are so shy about admitting our need for one another.

[...]

We say, ‘Would you like to come for some coffee?’, as though it were less frightening to acknowledge that we are heavily dependent on mildly stimulating drinks, than to acknowledge that we are at all dependent on the companionship of other people.”
― Jonathan Coe, The Accidental Woman

“...quando perdi qualcuno e questo qualcuno ti manca, tu soffri perché la persona assente si è trasformata in un essere immaginario: irreale. Ma il tuo desiderio di lei non è immaginario. Così è a quello che devi aggrapparti: al desiderio. Perché è reale.”
― Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep

“These pieces, he already realised, were merely stepping stones at the start of a journey towards something - some grand artefact, either musical, or literary, or filmic, or perhaps a combination of all three - towards which he knew he was advancing, slowly but with a steady, inexorable tread. Something which would enshrine his feelings for Cicely, and which she would perhaps hear, or read, or see in ten or twenty years' time, and suddenly realize, on her pulse, that it was created for her, intended for her, and that of all the boys who had swarmed around her like so many drones at school, Benjamin had been, without her having the wit to notice it, by far the purest in heart, by far the most gifted and giving. On that day the awareness of all she had missed, all she had lost, would finally break upon her in an instant, and she would weep; weep for her foolishness, and of the love that might have been between them.

Of course, Benjamin could always just have spoken to her, gone up to her in the bus queue and asked her for a date. But this seemed to him, on the whole, the more satisfactory approach.”
― Jonathan Coe, The Rotters' Club

“The upshot was that she lost her religion - with a vengeance - and walked out on him, taking these three daughters with her. Faith, Hope and Brenda.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“Am I the same person that I dream about?”
― Jonathan Coe, The Rotters' Club

“Your gravity, your grace have turned a tide
In me, no lunar power can reverse;
But in your narcoleptic eyes I spied
A sightlessness tonight: or something worse,
A disregard that made me feel unmanned.
Meanwhile, insomniac, I catch my breath
To think I saw my future traced in sand
One afternoon "as still, as carved, as death,”
And pray for an oblivion so deep
It ends in transformation. Only dawn
Can save me, flood this haunted house of sleep
With light, and drown the thoughts that nightly warn:
Another lifetime is the least you’ll need, to trace
The guarded secrets of her gravity, her grace.”
― Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep

“As for human contact, I'd lost all appetite for it. Mankind has, as you may have noticed, become very inventive about devising new ways for people to avoid talking to each other and I'd been taking full advantage of the most recent ones. I would always send a text message rather than speak to someone on the phone. Rather than meeting with any of my friends, I would post cheerful, ironically worded status updates on Facebook, to show them all what a busy life I was leading. And presumably people had been enjoying them, because I'd got more than seventy friends on Facebook now, most of them complete strangers. But actual, face-to-face, let's-meet-for-a-coffee-and-catch-up sort of contact? I seemed to have forgotten what that was all about.”
― Jonathan Coe, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim

“Me gusta la lluvia antes de caer. Ya sé que no existe. Por eso es mi favorita. Porque no hace falta que algo sea de verdad para hacerte feliz, ¿no?.”
― Jonathan Coe, The Rain Before it Falls

“Whatever else it throws at you, life will always have pleasures to offer. And we should take them”
― Jonathan Coe, Mr Wilder & Me

“They sat and drank their pints. The tables in which their faces were dimly reflected were dark brown, the darkest brown, the colour of Bournville chocolate. The walls were a lighter brown, the colour of Dairy Milk. The carpet was brown, with little hexagons of a slightly different brown, if you looked closely. The ceiling was meant to be off-white, but was in fact brown, browned by the nicotine smoke of a million unfiltered cigarettes. Most of the cars in the car park were brown, as were most of the clothes worn by the patrons. Nobody in the pub really noticed the predominance of brown, or if they did, thought it worth remarking upon. These were brown times.”
― Jonathan Coe, The Rotters' Club

“[...] life only starts to make sense when you realize that sometimes - often - all the time - two completely contradictory ideas can be true.
Everything that led up to you was wrong. Therefore, you should not have been born.
But everything about you is right: you had to be born.
You were inevitable.”
― Jonathan Coe, The Rain Before it Falls

“You didn't take part, Benjamin?" Gunther asked, as he passed me a plate of cheese and cold meat.
"My brother doesn't play games," said Paul. "He's an aesthete. He sat by the window all afternoon with a funny look on his face: probably composing a tone poem.”
― Jonathan Coe, The Rotters' Club

“[...] because there comes a point where greed and madness can no longer be told apart. This dividing line is very thin, just like a belt of film surrounding the earth's sphere. It's a delicate blue, and this transition from the blue to the black is very gradual and lovely.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“There’s a fine line between forgetting an event, and suppressing the memory of it.”
― Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep

“Yes, she would have been partial to men, perhaps she might even have confined herself to one man in particular, if only she had been able to find one who shared her view that intimacy between two people was of value irrespective of whether it led to sticky conflux.”
― Jonathan Coe, The Accidental Woman

“He waited in silence for the blindfold to be tied firmly at the back of his head. ‘Right,’ said Wilkins, emphatically. ‘That should do. How many fingers am I holding up?’ ‘Three,’ said Thomas. ‘God damn it to hell, how did you know that? Can you see through the cloth?’ ‘No. It was a guess.’ ‘Well you’re not supposed to guess. For crying out loud, I’m trying to make sure that you can’t see where we’re going. We’re not here to play guessing games. How many fingers am I holding up?’ ‘I’ve no idea. I can’t see a bloody thing.’ ‘Good. It was four, by the way. Not that it matters. Now shut up.”
― Jonathan Coe, Expo 58

“My daughter was right: young people do not notice the feelings of their parents, are not even aware that they have feelings, most of the time. They live in a blissful state of sociopathy, as far as their parents' emotions are concerned”
― Jonathan Coe, Mr Wilder & Me

“As you get older, the hopes get smaller and the regrets get bigger. The challenge is to fight it. To stop the regrets from taking over”
― Jonathan Coe, Mr Wilder & Me

“Growing up where she did, Beatrix had developed a romantic and adventurous nature, and she had no outlet for it any more. The happiest times I can remember spending with them were when we drove out - twice, I think - to the Long Mynd for a picnic. Roger had long since traded in his motorbike and scraped together enough money to buy a second-hand Morris Minor. Somehow we all squeezed into this (I seem to recall sitting in the front passenger seat, Beatrix sitting behind me with the baby on her lap) and drove out for the afternoon to those wonderful Shropshire hills. I wonder if you have ever walked on them yourself, Imogen. They are part of your story, you know. So many things have changed, changed beyond recognition, in the almost sixty years since the time I'm now recalling, but the Long Mynd is not one of them. In the last few months I have been too ill to walk there, but I did manage to visit in the last spring, to offer what I already sensed would be my final farewells. Places like this are important to me - to all of us - because they exist outside the normal timespan. You can stand on the backbone of the Long Mynd and not know if you are in the 1940s, the 2000s, the tenth or eleventh century... It is all immaterial, all irrelevant. The gorse and the purple heather are unchanging, and so are the sheeptracks which cut through them and criss-cross them, the twisted rocky outcrops which surprise you at every turn, the warm browns of the bracken, the distant greys of the conifer plantations, tucked far away down in secretive valleys. You cannot put a price on the sense of freedom and timelessness that is granted to you there, as you stand on the high ridge beneath a flawless sky of April blue and look across at the tame beauties of the English countryside, to the east, and to the west a hint of something stranger - the beginnings of the Welsh mountains”
― Jonathan Coe, The Rain Before it Falls

“...he was the proud owner of a quite colossal member, which on the many awestruck occasions it had been exposed to public view had been compared variously to a giant frankfurter, an overfed python, a length of led piping, the trunk of a rogue elephant, a barrage balloon, an airport-sized Toblerone and a roll of wet wallpaper.”
― Jonathan Coe, The Rotters' Club

“.. cerca di non arrabbiarti troppo con chi pensa di conoscerti meglio di quanto tu conosca te stesso. Ha buone intenzioni.”
― Jonathan Coe