Tessa Hadley > Quotes

“I probably reread novels more often than I read new ones. The novel form is made for rereading. Novels are by their nature too long, too baggy, too full of things – you can't hold them completely in your mind. This isn't a flaw – it's part of the novel's richness: its length, multiplicity of aspects, and shapelessness resemble the length and shapelessness of life itself. By the time you reach the end of the novel you will have forgotten the beginning and much of what happens in between: not the main outlines but the fine work, the detail and the music of the sentences – the particular words, through which the novel has its life. You think you know a novel so well that there must be nothing left in it to discover but the last time I reread Emma I found a little shepherd boy, brought into the parlour to sing for Harriet when she's staying with the Martin family. I'm sure he was never in the book before.”
― Tessa Hadley

“She imagined the reading she did now as like climbing inside one of those deep old beds she'd seen in a museum, with a sliding door to close behind you: even as she was suffering with a book and could hardly bear it, felt as if her heart would crack with emotion or with outrage at injustice, the act of reading it enclosed and saved her. Sometimes when she moved back out of the book and into her own life, just for a moment she could see her circumstances with a new interest and clarity, as if they were happening to someone else.”
― Tessa Hadley, Married Love and Other Stories

“Andy was receptive, like a deep vessel into which life was poured. If this terrible particular thing hadn't been poured into her, she would have been happier--it goes without saying--but less of a person. She was filled out by her fate. I actually think that this is quite rare, the capacity to become the whole shape of the accidents that happen to you.”
― Tessa Hadley

“You just say the opposite to what everyone else thinks. Is that why people think you’re so clever?”
― Tessa Hadley, Late in the Day

“Part of the oddity of marriage, she thought, was in how unwise it was to attend too intently to the other person. In order for love to survive, you had to close yourself off to a certain extent.”
― Tessa Hadley, The Past

“But she wasn't in love, though she had been ready to be. Love sank down gently from where it had been swollen in expectation -- she imagined a red balloon deflating to a foolish remnant. (In the cave, 171)”
― Tessa Hadley, Married Love and Other Stories

“But what if the novels were right? What if sentimentality was closer to the truth of life and cynicism was the evasion”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“But now everything was lost: all the scattered effect of a real person, complicated beyond counting. (Post production, 197)”
― Tessa Hadley, Married Love and Other Stories

“Ally wasn't disappointed in the writers: she hadn't expected anything from them in the first place; it hadn't occurred to her to be interested in writers as individuals beyond their work. To her relief no one whose books she'd read ever came to the centre, although sometimes she had to pretend to have read the writers who did. The writers could be fairly crazy, too; you had to be vigilant not to trip over their vanity or anxiety. Luckily, most of her favourites were dead. (She's the one, 151)”
― Tessa Hadley, Married Love and Other Stories

“I hate to think of you stuck here all day every day, doing nothing with that brilliant brain of yours.”
“It never was brilliant. Anyway, who keeps these books to see who’s used themselves wisely and who’s wasted?”
― Tessa Hadley, The Master Bedroom

“she scrubbed floors on her knees with a contemptuous hissing noise which must have come from her brush, though it seemed to come out of herself.”
― Tessa Hadley, The Past

“Other grown-ups, especially women, had learned somehow to live on the surfaces of their bodies, controlling them and presenting a prepared version of them to the world”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“And that was true too, that was what the Culverts were like: crucified by their shyness and at the same time contemptuous of the world of ordinary people they couldn't talk to.”
― Tessa Hadley, Sunstroke and Other Stories

“The present was always paramount, in a way that thrust you forward: empty, but also free. Whatever stories you told over to yourself and others, you were in truth exposed and naked in the present, a prow cleaving new waters; your past was insubstantial behind, it fell away, it grew into desuetude, its forms grew obsolete. The problem was, you were always still alive, until the end. You had to do something.”
― Tessa Hadley, The London Train

“I'm really all right, she would think, carefully, lightly, as she pulled the key from the ignition, trying not to examine the sensation too closely or lose it with any sudden movement, as if it were a thin-filmed shiny bubble poised in her chest.”
― Tessa Hadley, Married Love and Other Stories

“This is what had always happened to women when they had too much time to think: they made themselves conduits to all the passions in the universe, they dreamed open all the possibilities that sane hard-working people kept shut away.”
― Tessa Hadley, The Master Bedroom

“It's painful and terrible that youth is over, and with it that whole game of looking and longing and vying for attention, hoping for something, for some absolute transformation of everything. But it’s also a reprieve to be let off that hook and know that you’re simply in your own hands at last”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“Once they had been equal in their separate freedoms. They had set out to have children as lightly as if they were playing house, and now her necessarily domestic life bored him, and she was bound to it in her body and imagination. This imbalance was fated, built into their biology.”
― Tessa Hadley

“Goodness knows what hallucinations of danger and siege people are subject to, if they live anywhere too beautiful and too sequestered.”
― Tessa Hadley, The Master Bedroom

“What use was her grown-up knowledge--acquired through such initiations, at such risk--in this world of infants, who had to be kept safe?”
― Tessa Hadley, The Past

“....To have made up your mind from the beginning that everything people do is spoiled and bad and ugly. Really, I can't separate it from someone who believes in original sin. It's the new doctrine of original sin, environmentalism: the sins of the technological revolutions shall be visited upon the children until the nth generation. You believe the worst, so you never have to be disappointed. It's so cowardly, really.”
― Tessa Hadley, Accidents in the Home

“The past is closed up inside its own depressing little museum of faded styles and codes and anticipations; you can’t re-enter it”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“on an autumn day of showery fitful sunshine, fine rain floating in the gleams like dust motes, clouds liquid with light, thick cobwebs in the hedge glittering with raindrops.”
― Tessa Hadley, Late in the Day

“Sometimes these days I almost think I can do without the present. The past is enough for me, it’s enough for my life. Does that sound insane?”
― Tessa Hadley, Late in the Day

“I had worried sometimes about making the transition into being grown-up – how did you know when to begin? Now I understood that you stepped out into it, as simply as into a day”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“I’d lived all along as if I was acting out some turbulent drama; then I woke up one day and found I’d stopped believing in the play”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“There’s a kind of freedom too, no doubt about it, in our being fifty. It’s painful and terrible that youth is over, and with it that whole game of looking and longing and vying for attention, hoping for something, for some absolute transformation of everything. But it’s also a reprieve to be let off that hook and know that you’re simply in your own hands at last.”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“I’d rather be romantic than jaded. At least I’ve had a love life. Even if the romance does seem unreal sometimes, in retrospect. All that hard work of falling into love and falling out of it again. None of it leaves any trace, not visibly.”
― Tessa Hadley, The Past

“And it’s surprising how quickly you can get used to being loved”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“Sinden desired something in her which she hardly even knew that she possessed. Only yesterday she had been an irrevelant child; how amazing to find herself now at life's core, the object of such brusque, blind, heedless, hungry pursuit, as if nothing else in the world mattered.”
― Tessa Hadley, The Party