Rose Tremain > Quotes

“In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.”
― Rose Tremain

“Life is not a dress rehearsal.”
― Rose Tremain

“And she did not want him to think her quite mad, only a little unique, only containing within her just that measure of the unexpected sufficient to make her irreplaceable.”
― Rose Tremain, Music & Silence

“Music is so important in a human life. It finds a space inside us that nothing else touches.’ Gustav”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“Acceptance, she thinks, is the harshest lesson life teaches and the one most important to learn.”
― Rose Tremain, Music & Silence

“And it is silence that she hears, the silence of lost years that have no voice left in them.”
― Rose Tremain, Music & Silence

“He’d never seen a rain quite like this so gentle that it seemed barely to fall yet slowly laid its shine on the bay leaves and hydrangea flowers…”
― Rose Tremain, The Road Home

“We have to become the people we always should have been.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“Wasting time changes the nature of time. And the heart is stilled.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“Inevitably we make a small world in the midst of a big one. For a small world is all we know how to make.’p46”
― Rose Tremain

“There is something about the unexpected that moves us. As if the whole of existance is paid for in some way, except for that one moment, witch is free.”
― Rose Tremain, Sacred Country

“When you’re old nobody touches you nobody listens to you—not in this bloody country.so that’s what I do. I touch and I listen.”
― Rose Tremain, The Road Home

“Human society is ninety percent muck that won't disperse to the appropriate location that’s why I chose the profession of plumber.”
― Rose Tremain, The Road Home

“And he feels grateful that he has been left with this one substantial relic of all his years of service and thinks how sincerely he has deserved this. Yet he knows the world in which people deserve things or do not deserve them is passing away. Europe is at war. Fairness is now becoming a word without meaning.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“She would, on the birthday of Christ, allow herself what she called "an extra helping of prayer." At the time of the Civil War, she would pray for peace. Always, she asked God to spare me and my father. But at Christmas, she talked to God as if He were Clerk of the Acts in the Office of Public Works. She prayed for cleaner air in London. She prayed that our chimneys would not fall over in the January winds; she prayed that our neighbour, Mister Simkins, would attend to his cesspit, so that it would cease its overflow into ours. She prayed that Amos Treefeller would not slip and drown "going down the public steps to the river at Blackfriars, which are much neglected and covered in slime, Lord." And she prayed, of course, that plague would not come.
As a child, she allowed me to ask God to grant me things for which my heart longed. I would reply that my heart longed for a pair of skates made of bone or for a kitten from Siam. And we would sit by the fire, the two of us, praying. And then we would eat a lardy cake, which my mother had baked herself, and ever since that time the taste of lardy cake has had about it the taste of prayer.”
― Rose Tremain, Restoration

“Lev took out a cigarette and stuck it between his lips and the woman sitting next to him a plump contained person with moles like splashes of mud on her face said quickly "I'm sorry but there is no smoking allowed on this bus." Lev knew this had known it in advance had tried to prepare himself mentally for the long agony of it. But even an unlit cigarette was a companion -something to hold on to something that had promise in it -and all he could be bothered to do now was to nod just to show the woman that he'd heard what she'd said reassure her that he wasn't going to cause trouble because there they would have to sit for fifty hours or more side by side with their separate aches and dreams like a married couple. They would hear each other's snores and sighs smell the food and drink each had brought with them note the degree to which each was fearful or unafraid make short forays into conversation. And then later when they finally arrived in London they would probably separate with barely a word or a look walk out into a rainy morning each alone and beginning a new life. And Lev thought how all of this was odd but necessary and already told him things about the world he was traveling to a world in which he would break his back working -if only that work could be found.”
― Rose Tremain, The Road Home

“Майка ти плачеше. Каза ми: "Бет я очакваше прекрасен живот..."
- Аз живях прекрасен живот. Просто приключи рано, това е.”
― Rose Tremain, The American Lover

“My name is Lev," said Lev.

"My name is Lydia," said the woman. And they shook hands, Lev's hand holding the scrunched-up kerchief and Lydia's hand rough with salt and smelling of egg, and then Lev asked, "What are you planning to do in En gland?" and Lydia said, "I have some interviews in London for jobs as a translator."

"That sounds promising."

"I hope so. I was a teacher of English at School 237 in Yarbl, so my language is very colloquial."

Lev looked at Lydia. It wasn't difficult to imagine her standing in front of a class and writing words on a blackboard. He said, "I wonder why you're leaving our country when you had a good job at School 237 in Yarbl?"

"Well," said Lydia, "I became very tired of the view from my window. Every day, summer and winter, I looked out at the schoolyard and the high fence and the apartment block beyond, and I began to imagine I would die seeing these things, and I didn't want this. I expect you understand what I mean?”
― Rose Tremain, The Road Home

“This is the state to which I shall aspire, where what is important to me is already mine.”
― Rose Tremain, The Colour

“Zaten bir şey geçmişte kaldığı zaman, onu şimdiki anın gerçekliğinde bir fanteziden, bir ilüzyondan farklı kılan şey nedir ki? Bir zamanlar yaşanmış olsa da artık anılar dışında var olamaz.”
― Rose Tremain, Music & Silence

“Forget the boring old dictum "write about what you know." Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.”
― Rose Tremain

“At the age of five, Gustav Perle was certain of only one thing: he loved his mother.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“We may avoid shame if we choose, for shame seldom takes us unawares but has its warning cry, and we can hear that cry as clearly as we can hear the coming of the north wind... The man lying in the mud hadn't heard the coming of the north wind.”
― Rose Tremain

“And I was entirely held by my own words, as if my words had become a liquid and I immersed in them, like a drowning man in a rushing river.”
― Rose Tremain, Restoration

“The world is packed with mistery. We tend to forget this, but itțs still packed tight with it, like water in stone.”
― Rose Tremain, Sacred Country

“Bir adam vazgeçtiği şeylerin çok uzağına gidip kaybolursa bir daha asla geri dönemeyebilirdi.”
― Rose Tremain, Music & Silence

“Umut garip bir alışkanlıktır.
Bir tür uyuşturucudur.
Bıraktığımıza dair yeminler ederiz, ama o da ne? Bir gün gelir, yine kölesi oluruz.”
― Rose Tremain, Music & Silence

“Let winter come. Let the snow fall and consume Bath in a shroud of silence. Let everything feel as bound and stifled as my heart.”
― Rose Tremain, Islands of Mercy

“But such are our days. Such are the days and times of Every Man and, no matter how hard we work and strive, we can never know when something shall be given to us and when it will be taken away.”
― Rose Tremain, Merivel: A Man of His Time

“It is merely that I have been held in an embrace so strong by the journey that I find I have relinquished the will to arrive.”
― Rose Tremain, Merivel: A Man of His Time