Alan Judd > Quotes

“She got out and shut the door without looking back, picking her way through the snow to the black wooden door in the college wall. At least she hadn’t told him not to follow. He watched as she carefully brushed the snow off the latch with her rolled umbrella before touching it with her suede gloves. She left the door half open behind her. He followed. When he reached the door he saw she had paused on the garden path leading to her hall and was doing something in the snow with the tip of her umbrella. Still not looking back, she moved on without waiting for him. When he reached the spot he saw that she had written ‘I love you’ in the snow. It was that night, he believed ever after, that she became pregnant.”
― Alan Judd, Uncommon Enemy

“When you are young you do not understand how different then and now are because you have lived only in now and it feels as if that is where you will always live. You do not realize that your now -and you- are becoming then. And when you realise how completely now has become then, how different it is, it is like the fall of the axe. It splits you off from all these younger people, who, however much they think they know or understand, cannot feel life as it was then. The pulse if it, that was the thing, always, with everything, and that is what cannot be conveyed.”
― Alan Judd, The Kaiser's Last Kiss

“Waiting for her in reception, pretending to read a paper, he was surprised by his own nervousness; an indication of how little one knew oneself. She”
― Alan Judd, Uncommon Enemy

“facts in the sense of an individual past. Facts were like longitude on a map, measurements of temporal relativity, evoking but not containing the myriad associations, tones, colours, remarks, incidents, feelings that formed the patchwork brocade of a life.”
― Alan Judd, Uncommon Enemy

“you’ll hate it. Not only because of the merger. The old office you and I knew has succumbed to management blight: meetings, mission statements, jargon, targets, obsession with process, the mania for measurement. Everything that can be counted, is; which, almost by definition, is what doesn’t matter. Nothing of value can be measured, so it’s not valued.”
― Alan Judd, Uncommon Enemy

“Things happened, as soon as they had they were in the past, once they were, there was nothing you could do. Days and nights followed in a seamless phantasmagoria of action and inaction, of weariness, privation, duty, routine and waiting, always so much waiting. What had happened yesterday might have been in another life, as remote from today as the unknowable events of tomorrow.”
― Alan Judd, The Kaiser's Last Kiss

“The Americans don’t know about him?’ ‘Too dangerous. Either it would leak, or they’d be unable to resist killing any AQ figure he was with, and him too.”
― Alan Judd, Uncommon Enemy

“Darkness crumbled into gloom the next morning”
― Alan Judd, Legacy