Mal Peet > Quotes

“You do not win a war by dying for your country. You win a war by making sure that some poor bastard dies for his.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“Sentimentality and nostalgia are closely related. Kissing cousins. I have no time for nostalgia, though. Nostalgics believe the past is nicer than the present. It isn't. Or wasn't. Nostalgics want to cuddle the past like a puppy. But the past has bloody teeth and bad breath. I look into its mouth like a sorrowing dentist.”
― Mal Peet, Life: An Exploded Diagram

“So? You think people stop talking to you when they are dead?”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“instead of being in history he was in love”
― Mal Peet, Life: An Exploded Diagram

“What I'm trying to explain to my sulky little cousin is that we are doing things backwards. We are going from the end of the river to the start of the river. And endings are always sad. We are doing the sad bit first, which is wrong. Strange.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We're not especially interested in what it consists of. We wait, more or less patiently, for it to pause, so that we can get to the liquor store or the laundromat or the burger bar.”
― Mal Peet, Life: An Exploded Diagram

“He used to say the uglier things are the longer they live, and the ugliest things live forever.”
― Mal Peet, The Penalty

“I lived through all these times, these great events, without caring very much, concerned with my own aging rather than the world's. Most of us do likewise. History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We're not especially interested in what it consists of. We wait, more or less patiently, for it to pause, so that we can get to the liquor store or the laundromat or the burger bar”
― Mal Peet, Life: An Exploded Diagram

“Unfortunately, however, weapons of mass destruction tend to attract maniacs: men - it's almost always men - who want to jab the red button and yell "Take that, you heathen infidel bastards!" and sit in their revolving chairs in underground lead-lined bunkers or caves, watching on their monitors World War III or the Final Jihad or whatever.”
― Mal Peet, Life: An Exploded Diagram

“The past is a dark house, and we have only torches with dying batteries. It's probably best not to spend too much time in there in case the rotten floor gives way beneath our feet.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“Boredom had not been among the dangers that the SOE had prepared him for. No pompous little officer had stood in front of his class and said, "Right, chaps, today we're going to learn how to deal with a particularly nasty little situation that secret agents tend to find themselves in: being bored abso-bloody-lutely rigid".”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“Let me tell you something. When there is a penalty kick, most people think that the penalty taker is in control. But they are wrong. The penalty taker is full of fear, because he is expected to score. He is under great pressure. He has many choices to make, and as he places the ball and walks back to make his run, his mind is full of the possibility of failure. This makes him vulnerable, and it makes the keeper very powerful.”
― Mal Peet, Keeper

“He taught me that language was rubbery, plastic. It wasn't, as I thought, something you just use, but something you can play with. Words were made up of little bits that could be shuffled, turned back to front, remixed. They could be tucked and folded into other words to produce unexpected things. It was like cookery, like alchemy. Language hid more than it revealed.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“Thank God in an atheist.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“This line of reasoning could have frightened him, but it did not. He gained a certain strength from it. Because, after all, what can be imagined can be achieved.

At the head of the stairs, he paused to straighten a mask that had been knocked askew.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“Fundamentalism - of any variety - is a form of illiteracy, in that it asserts that it is necessary to read only one book.”
― Mal Peet

“Sprawled, bloody, holding the pistol, he looked like a police photograph of a suicide. Dart went back to his chair and picked up the Smith and Wesson. Five minutes passed like a year.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“Writers no longer work in solitude, crafting meaningful and elegant prose. No. They have to spend most of their time selling themselves on the fucking internet. Blogging and tweeting and updating their bloody Facebook pages and their wretched narcissistic websites.”
― Mal Peet, The Murdstone Trilogy

“Yoyo said to me recently, 'Love and pain, that's what families are, and they fit together like this'--he slotted the tips of our fingers together--'like cogs.' Then he smiled and put a hand on my swollen belly. 'And what makes these cogs turn is hope, of course.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“Philip Murdstone sat considering the phrase ‘depths of despair’. Its plural implied that there were, even now, levels of it he had yet to experience.”
― Mal Peet, The Murdstone Trilogy

“He loved her. It was dead simple, the way he loved her. Seamless. His love was like a wall that he'd built around her, and there wasn't a chink or flaw in it. Or so he thought. But then she started to float out of the real world, his world, and he was like a little boy trying to dam a stream with stones and mud, knowing that the water would always break through at a place he wasn't looking at. There was nothing desperate about the way he did it, though. He was always calm, it seemed. Expecting the worst and determined not to crack. She started to get up in the night and turn on all the taps, and he would get up too and stand quietly beside her watching the endless flow of water as if he found it as fascinating as she did. Then he'd guide her back to bed before turning the taps off. One night I heard something and went into the living room and saw the two of them standing out on the balcony. He'd wrapped his dressing gown around her, and I heard him say, "Yes, you are right, Marijke. The traffic is like a river of stars. Would you like to watch is some more, or go back to bed?”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“Yes, I still think of him as that, call him that. It's as real as any of his other names.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“I hate Tolkien. I mean. Bloody pretentious escapist nonsense, isn’t it?”
― Mal Peet, The Murdstone Trilogy

“Freedom had no place in the Soviet System. Freedom was another word for anarchy, and that wouldn't do at all.”
― Mal Peet, Life: An Exploded Diagram

“Wagstaff was a trim little man in a dark-blue uniform with an armband embroidered with the words CIVIL DEFENSE.

"Thank you, Headmaster, and good morning, young gentlemen. Yesterday, as I'm sure you'll remember, I spoke to you about the ways you can help your parents prepare their homes against the possibility of nuclear attack."

Clem grinned, noting Tash Harmsworth's scowl. Tash was a bugger for an incorrect proposition.”
― Mal Peet, Life: An Exploded Diagram

“But I get ahead of myself, which is nearly as bad as getting Above Myself.”
― Mal Peet, Life: An Exploded Diagram

“Fluke me, Murdstone.”
― Mal Peet, The Murdstone Trilogy

“Algebra messed up one of those divisions between things that help you make sense of the world and keep it tidy. Letters make words; figures make numbers. They had no business getting tangled up together.”
― Mal Peet, Tamar

“Gone are the days when you simply write a jolly good book and wait for the queues to form. Readers need to be friended, darling. They need to be subscribers. They need to be followers.”
― Mal Peet, The Murdstone Trilogy

“How cruel hope is, and what a sly hunter.”
― Mal Peet, The Penalty