Barbara Vine > Quotes

“Without me, without me,
Everyday's misery.
But with me - am I wrong?
No night is too long!”
― Barbara Vine, No Night Is Too Long

“Our children, when young, are part of ourselves. When they grow up they are just other people.”
― Barbara Vine, The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

“His books distracted him for a while. They were like the aspirins you take when you've got a headache. They kill the pain for two hours and then it comes back.”
― Barbara Vine, Gallowglass

“Why do you always wear black?”
She delighted me with her answer, the correct, the only, answer. “I’m in mourning for my life. I’m unhappy.”
― Barbara Vine, No Night is Too Long

“Empty minds are abhorred by thought as vacuums are by nature.”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“Love is about allowing. Love is about letting people be free. You leave the cage door open and if you're really loved, the bird flies back to be with you. That's the only kind of love worth having.”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“The safest way to live is first, inherit money, second be born without a taste for liquor, third, have a legitimate job that keeps you busy, fourth, marry a wife who will cooperate in your sexual peculiarities, fifth, join some big church, sixth, don't live too long.”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“Evil was a stupid word. It had the same sort of sense, largely meaningless, amorphous, diffuse, wooly, as applied to "love." Everyone had a vague idea of what it meant but none could precisely have defined it. It seemed, in a way, to imply something supernatural.”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“Life is too short to be so circumspect.”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“Is there any sadder sight than a burnt out library?”
― Barbara Vine, The Minotaur

“Mark Twain had written somewhere: We are all mad at night.”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“Time, the best of all doctors, though it kills you in the end, had done more than therapy could.”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“But it was more than that. There was an indefinable ingredient, a kind of excitement. It had something to do with history and the past, that excitement, and something to do with potential as well, with what Orwell or somebody had said. that every man really knew in his heart the finest place to be was the countryside on a summer's day. I was happy, that's what it was.”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“I think life's too long to do anything that we know is wrong before we begin.”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“I am not in this world to live up to your expectations and you are not in this world to live up to mine. I am I and you are you. And if we find each other that's beautiful, if not, it can't be helped.”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“Events in his own past he never thought of as evil but rather as mistaken, immensely regrettable, brought about by fear and greed.”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“I lived in the present. That’s supposed to be a good thing, you know, an ideal, according to modern psychology. Odd, because the truth is, one lives in the present when the past is too bad to remember and the future too dreadful to contemplate.”
― Barbara Vine, A Dark-Adapted Eye

“A disturbing experience it had been, exciting and confusing.”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“We are all mad at three in the morning”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“Games were being played, that was all, and games of which he was largely ignorant and wished to remain so.”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“The wonderful thing about the human mind is the way it copes when the worst happens. Beyond that worst happening you think there can be nothing, the unimaginable has taken place, and on the other side is death, destruction, the end. But the worst happens and you reel from it, you stagger, the shock is enormous, and then you begin to recover. You rally, you stand up and face it. You get used to it.
For what had happen was not the worst, you realize that. the worst was yet to come, was perhaps always yet to come, never would actually come, because if it did, you would know it, that would be reality, and there would be nothing then but to kill yourself. Quickly.”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“You do not put off things because they threaten you, because you are afraid; It was a rule of life.”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“Isak Dinesen said that life is no more than a process for turning healthy young puppies into mangy old dogs and man but an exquisite instrument for converting the red wine of Shiraz into urine.”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“It changes, but in some lives change is a long time coming.”
― Barbara Vine, The House of Stairs

“Those who have inside their lives an empty space need to fill it with love if they can, and if they cannot, with things. And they need to please others in order that others may give them love. Those who need love with the hunger the rest of mankind keeps for food, for the necessaries of life, give their bodies simply and without reflection for a return of love, would give their soul if they knew how, are reduced to thievery of the basest kind and of the basest things because this is the easiest way.”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“Lewis would have agreed with Oscar Wilde that our past is what we are. We cannot rid ourselves of it.”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“By the age I was then I ought to know the truism that things always look different in the morning. As the night comes on and the deeper it gets, the more mad we are, the more prone to dreadful fears and fantasies. In the morning, not when we first wake up but gradually, things begin to look unlike what they looked like at eleven, at midnight.”
― Barbara Vine, The Child's Child

“The hands of the watch stood at five past eight. The only kind of death that can be accurately predicted to the minute had taken place, the death that takes its victim, … feet foremost through the floor, Into an empty space. 2 THREE TIMES IN THE past thirty-five years I had seen her name in print.”
― Barbara Vine, A Dark-Adapted Eye

“He thought, I know what my idea of heaven would be, if by heaven we mean a place of bliss in which to pass eternity: a sanctuary where one might chain-smoke without impairment of breathing, destruction of the lungs, or damage to the heart, light each fresh cigarette from the glowing butt of its predecessor, and drink ice-free but hundred-proof chilled vodka laced with two drops of angostura and a gill of newly opened Perrier endlessly, with increasing euphoria, until a peak of joy and ease was reached but without any subsequent nausea or pain or dehydration or oblivion…”
― Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion

“Staying thin wasn’t just a losing battle with Cosette but a series of skirmishes in which about fifty percent of the time her side won.”
― Barbara Vine, The House of Stairs