Stan Barstow > Quotes

“You can be in love with someone you hardly know, all romance and rapture and starry eyes.... But you can’t love a person till you know him or her inside out, until you have lived with them and shared experience... you have got to share living before you can find love.”
― Stan Barstow

“You can't love a person till you know him or her inside out, until you've lived with them and shared experience: sadness, joy, living - you've got to share living before you can find love. Being in love doesn't last, but you can find love to take its place.”
― Stan Barstow, A Kind of Loving

“People’s lives are often other than they seem to be on the surface. And sometimes, what’s underneath and hidden is the best part of all, the part of real value.”
― Stan Barstow

“The days draw out, the weather gets warmer, and it's what we call summer, with a bitter laugh when we've said it.”
― Stan Barstow, A Kind of Loving

“Bints are the very devil to understand.”
― Stan Barstow, A Kind of Loving

“I can't imagine myself at that age with all my troubles behind me and nothing left but pottering in the garden till the end.”
― Stan Barstow, A Kind of Loving

“I think it's a pity she doesn't read because it means we shan't ever be able to talk about the books we've both read and recommend them to one another.”
― Stan Barstow, A Kind of Loving

“answered, pulling on his overcoat. All the loneliness of the evening seemed to descend upon her at once then and she said with the suggestion of a whine in her voice, ‘Why don’t you take me with you some Saturday?’ ‘You?’ he said. ‘Take you? D’you think you’re fit to take anywhere? Look at yersen! An’ when I think of you as you used to be!’ She looked away. The abuse had little sting now. She could think of him too, as he used to be; but she did not do that too often now, for such memories had the power of evoking a misery which was stronger than the inertia that, over the years, had become her only defence. ‘What time will you be back?’ ‘Expect me when you see me,’ he said at the door. ‘Is’ll want a bite o’ supper, I expect.’ Expect him at whatever time his tipsy legs brought him home, she thought. If he lost he would drink to console himself. If he won he would drink to celebrate. Either way there was nothing in it for her but yet more ill temper, yet further abuse. She got up a few minutes after he had gone and went to the back door to look out. It was snowing again and the clean, gentle fall softened the stark and ugly outlines of the decaying outhouses on the patch of land behind the house and gently obliterated Scurridge’s footprints where they led away from the door, down the slope to the wood, through which ran a path to the main road, a mile distant. She shivered as the cold air touched her, and returned indoors, beginning, despite herself, to remember. Once the sheds had been sound and strong and housed poultry. The garden had flourished too, supplying them with sufficient vegetables for their own needs and some left to sell. Now it was overgrown with rampant grass and dock. And the house itself – they had bought it for a song because it was old and really too big for one woman to manage; but it too had been strong and sound and it had looked well under regular coats of paint and with the walls pointed and the windows properly hung. In the early days, seeing it all begin to slip from her grasp, she had tried to keep it going herself. But it was a thankless, hopeless struggle without support from Scurridge: a struggle which had beaten her in the end, driving her first into frustration and then finally apathy. Now everything was mouldering and dilapidated and its gradual decay was like a symbol of her own decline from the hopeful young wife and mother into the tired old woman she was now. Listlessly she washed up and put away the teapots. Then she took the coal-bucket from the hearth and went down into the dripping, dungeon-like darkness of the huge cellar. There she filled the bucket and lugged it back up the steps. Mending the fire, piling it high with the wet gleaming lumps of coal, she drew some comfort from the fact that this at least, with Scurridge’s miner’s allocation, was one thing of which they were never short. This job done, she switched on the battery-fed wireless set and stretched out her feet in their torn canvas shoes to the blaze. They were broadcasting a programme of old-time dance music: the Lancers, the Barn Dance, the Veleta. You are my honey-honey-suckle, I am the bee… Both she and”
― Stan Barstow, The Likes of Us: Stories of Five Decades

“I often wonder what it is makes bints pair off like this, one lovely and one horrible. You see it all the time and it must have turned more lads against one another than nearly anything else because if you're hunting in pairs somebody's got to have the horror.”
― Stan Barstow, A Kind of Loving

“Mr Van Huyten tells me to have patience with music and it’ll all open out like a big flower some day. ‘Why do they make it so hard to listen to?’ I ask him one night when we’re coming back from a Hallé concert in St George’s Hall in Bradford. ‘But they don’t set out to do that, Victor,’ he says. ‘That’s just the point. These popular tunes that you have in the… what do you call it – the Hit Parade? They’re so simple they go in one ear and out the other. How long do they last? A few weeks, or a month or two at the most. But this is music which endures for hundreds of years. It will be listened to as long as men live. Can you expect music of that stature to have the immediate appeal of a popular song? Someone once said that great art doesn’t reveal all its secrets at one glance. Be patient, let it work on you, let it flow over you. One day you’ll hear the most glorious music where you now hear only a din. You’ll hear it all, Victor, I hope. The thunder and majesty of Beethoven, the grace and tragic beauty of Mozart, the glorious singing of Brahms, the noble sadness of Elgar. It’s like a wonderful voyage of discovery, Victor, with magic over every horizon. Here is all the music in the world just waiting for you to find it. How I wish I could go back fifty years and discover it all afresh!”
― Stan Barstow, A Kind of Loving

“Well, she can't have it both ways, can she? Just like a woman to want it, though.”
― Stan Barstow, A Kind of Loving

“...a bloke can have six cars and holidays in the south of France every year and it's still what's inside him what counts.”
― Stan Barstow, A Kind of Loving