Jenny Diski > Quotes

“Everything passes, but nothing entirely goes away.”
― Jenny Diski

“It isn't important what you do, it is the attitude with which you proceed through the world that matters.”
― Jenny Diski, Stranger on a Train

“But nothing will persuade me that the mere fact of being in a place is enough in itself to justify the effort of getting out of bed to become a tourist, or even a traveller. I don't have the slightest wish to be intrepid. I don't want to prove myself to myself or anyone else. I don't care if no one thinks me brave or hardy. I have no concern at all that I did not have whatever it is I should have had to take a dive out of a plane or off a building. None of that matters to me in the least.”
― Jenny Diski, On Trying to Keep Still

“Being really alone means being free from anticipation. Even to know that something is going to happen, that I am required to do something is an intrusion on the emptiness I am after. What I love to see is an empty diary, pages and pages of nothing planned. A date, an arrangement, is a point in the future when something is required of me. I begin to worry about it days, sometimes weeks ahead. Just a haircut, a hospital visit, a dinner party. Going out. The weight of the thing-that-is-going-to-happen sits on my heart and crushes the present into non-existence. My ability to live in the here and now depends on not having any plans, on there being no expected interruption. I have no other way to do it. How can you be alone, properly alone, if you know someone is going to knock at the door in five hours, or tomorrow morning, or you have to get ready and go out in three days’ time? I can’t abide the fracturing of the present by the intrusion of a planned future.”
― Jenny Diski

“But I do know a kind of madness that lies low in the mind, half-buried in consciousness, which lives in parallel to sanity, and given the right circumstances or even just half a chance, creeps like a lick of flame or a growing tumour up and around ordinary perception, consuming it for a while, and causing one, even when not at the movies, to quake in fear of the world and people and what they--I mean, of, we--are capable of.”
― Jenny Diski, Stranger on a Train

“We were greeted by the minister whose inclusive, non-judgemental smile was no more than a whisker away from a smirk. Have I made it clear? I don't like belief systems and even less like those that peddle self-righteousness. I have no doubt the minister was a sincere man, but I am not as impressed by the idea of sincerity as the sincere seem to be.”
― Jenny Diski, On Trying to Keep Still

“She wished Martin hadn't taken his Encyclopaedia Britannica with him when they split up. She missed that more than she missed him.”
― Jenny Diski, The Vanishing Princess

“Indolence has always been my most essential quality. ‘Essential’ in the sense that it is the single quality I am convinced I possess and by which I can be recognised and remembered, and also in the sense that I feel most essentially like myself when I am exercising it. I cannot recollect a time when the idea of going for a walk was not a torment to me; a proposition that endangered my constant wish to stay where I was. I imagine myself, child and adult, curled up in an armchair, reading and being told (as a child) or invited (as an adult) to go out and do something. I cannot think why a person sitting with evident contentment in an armchair causes the desire in others for their immediate activity.”
― Jenny Diski, Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?

“But given that depression happened to me, and I did have support, I found it was possible after a time, to achieve a kind of joy totally disconnected from the world. I wanted to be unavailable and in that place without the pain. I still want it. It is coloured white and filled with a singing silence. It is an endless ice-rink. It is Antarctica.”
― Jenny Diski

“I'd better explain something about myself. Just as I wasn''t your archetypal beauty of a miller's daughter, I also did not have the same hankerings after pretty golden princes as my peers were universally supposed to have. Don't ask me why. A matter of personal taste. The King, as handsome as a former fairytale prince must be once he's stopped being a frog, left me cold. I had always been attracted to—how can I put it?—the unusual. The shepherd boy was no one's idea of an Adonis; he suffered badly from the after-effects of chickenpox, and had a body which at best could be called weedy. But once he did the things he did, I came to love each and every pock mark on his pallid cheeks, and lay in my bed at night entertaining myself with visions of his skinny thighs and thin, unmanly, rounded shoulders. It's fascinating how human desire can find all manner of things exciting once it's been given a push in the right direction.”
― Jenny Diski, The Vanishing Princess

“I have a special place devoted to worry that has an insatiable hunger to be filled. When it’s empty, it worries anyway about what it’s going to worry about. A sick kitten is ideal worry-material.”
― Jenny Diski, Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?: Essays

“...he was an ass. Her husband and Thomas' father was an ass: a fool who thought iut funny to frighten a small child, who could not resist the small, mean act of betrayal that proved him more powerful than his four-year-old son.”
― Jenny Diski, The Vanishing Princess

“In my experience, writing doesn’t get easier the more you do it. But there is a growth of confidence, not much, but a nugget, like a pearl, like a tumour. You learn that there is a process, and that it doesn’t very much matter what you write, but how you do it, that is crucial, and that nothing I wrote, or you wrote, is ever going to be the same as what she wrote and he wrote, unless, as Truman Capote said, what you’re dealing with isn’t writing, but typing. So I’ve got cancer. I’m writing.”
― Jenny Diski, In Gratitude

“Disapproval always depends on other people - dead people, foreigners - doing the unacceptable action.”
― Jenny Diski, Skating to Antarctica

“Jenny Diski lies here. But tells the truth over there”,’ I instructed. ‘Also, I’d like a dove, a winged angel, an anchor and an open book, properly carved on a nice piece of granite.”
― Jenny Diski, Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?: Essays

“There are infinite ways of telling the truth, including fiction, and infinite ways of evading the truth, including non-fiction.”
― Jenny Diski, Skating to Antarctica

“...as a child, she had believed in God because it was so clear, so obvious, that he existed. She couldn't imagine how anyone could think differently. And then, ten years on, the same absolute conviction that there was no deity, no otherness, only the material world that could be seen, heard and felt. How could anyone possibly believe in God? It wasn't until a further ten years on that she had come to the possibility of agnosticism, and the ability to live with an uncertainty. Even then, she had trouble understanding how anyone could believe firmly one way or the other.”
― Jenny Diski, The Vanishing Princess

“stickability.”
― Jenny Diski, Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?: Essays