Michael Frayn > Quotes

“Mathematics becomes very odd when you apply it to people. One plus one can add up to so many different sums”
― Michael Frayn, Copenhagen

“I haven't come to the theater to hear about other people's probelms. I've come to be taken out of myself, and, preferably, not put back again.”
― Michael Frayn Noises Off

“Some questions remain long after their owners have died. Lingering like ghosts. Looking for the answers they never found in life.”
― Michael Frayn, Copenhagen

“We can't stop reading. Compulsively we find ourselves reading significance into dreams (we construct a science upon it); into tea-leaves and the fall of cards. We look up at the shifting vapours in the sky, and see faces, lost cities, defeated armies. Isolated in the dark, with nothing to hear and no surfaces to touch, we hallucinate reading-matter. Our craving becomes generalized – for 'the meaning of life'.

If we lived alone in a featureless desert we should learn to place the individual grains of sand in a moral or aesthetic hierarchy. We should long to find the greatest grain of sand in the world, and even (in order to find a fixed point of orientation in time as well as in space) the all-time greatest grain of sand; the grain of sand whose discovery changed our whole understanding of grains of sand for ever.”
― Michael Frayn, Constructions

“Bohr: Heisenberg, I have to say - if people are to be measured strictly in terms of observable quantities...

Heisenberg: Then we should need a strange new quantum ethics.”
― Michael Frayn, Copenhagen

“The almost egregiously English couple, Cedric and Rosamund Chailey, had slipped quietly away when the conversation turned to God. It had not seemed polite to be present when anything so American was being discussed.”
― Michael Frayn, Skios

“I should say that happiness is being where one is and not wanting to be anywhere else.”
― Michael Frayn, A Landing on the Sun

“And now everything has changed once again. The air of the Close each evening is full of bird song - I've never really noticed it before. Full of birdsong and summer perfumes, full of strange glimpses and intimations just out of the corner of my eye, of longings and sadness and undefined hopes. It has a name, this sweet disturbance. Its name is Lamorna.”
― Michael Frayn, Spies

“Bohr Before we can lay our hands on anything, our life’s over.
Heisenberg Before we can glimpse who or what we are, we’re gone and laid to dust.
Bohr Settled among all the dust we raised.
Margrethe And sooner or later there will come a time when all our children are laid to dust, and all our children’s children.”
― Michael Frayn, Copenhagen

“Two thousand million people in the world, and the one who has to decide their fate is is the only one who's always hidden from me.”
― Michael Frayn, Copenhagen

“Yes, and you’ve never been able to understand the suggestiveness of paradox and contradiction. That’s your problem. You live and breathe paradox and contradiction, but you can no more see the beauty of them than the fish can see the beauty of the water”
― Michael Frayn, Copenhagen

“We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets, never to be reconciled, to our fellow-country men, to our neighbors, to our friends, to our family to our children. We have to go through not two slits at the same time but twenty-two. All we can do is to look afterwards, and see what happened.”
― Michael Frayn, Copenhagen

“..deceivers must expect to be deceived.”
― Michael Frayn, The Russian Interpreter

“Why did *I* lock the door? Why did YOU lock the door? Someone locked the door...”
― Michael Frayn, Noises Off: A Play in Three Acts

“I can't help feeling," says Howard, sticking his head forward ruefully, "now I know who you are, that I've been a bit outspoken in some of my remarks about the system."

"Not at all!" says Freddie.

"Not a bit!" says Caroline.

"But I must in all honesty say," says Howard very quickly, jutting his chin out and smilingly blinking his eyes, "that I still think there are a number of things in the universe which really need seriously looking into."

"Oh, the whole thing!" says Freddie with feeling.

"Ghastly mess," says Caroline.

"Absolute disaster area," says Freddie.

"Frightful," says Caroline.

"So far as one can understand it," says Freddie.

"Freddie feels frightfully strongly about it, you see," says Caroline.

Howard looks from one to the other in astonishment.

"Good heavens!" he says. "I should never have guessed...."

"Oh, Freddie's a terrific radical," says Caroline.

"Really?" says Howard.

"A terrible firebrand, really," says Caroline.

Freddie knots himself up.

"A bit firebrandish," he admits.

"A bit of a Maoist, to tell you the truth," says Caroline.

She looks sideways at Howard to see how he is taking this. So does Freddie.

"A Maoist?" says Howard, astonished.

"Permanent revolution," says Caroline.

"That style of thing," agrees Freddie.

"What he feels, you see," says Caroline, "is that people ought to struggle pretty well all the time against the limitations of the world and their own nature. Not stop."

Howard gazes at Freddie, deeply impressed.

"Don't worry," says Freddie. "I don't think my views have much effect.”
― michael frayn, Sweet Dreams

“Perhaps the home I am homesick for is still there, after all.”
― Michael Frayn

“Margrethe: And when all our eyes are closed, when even the ghosts have gone, what will be left of our beloved world? Our ruined and dishonoured and beloved world?”
― Michael Frayn

“He felt lonely. His solitude was thrown into relief by being observed.”
― Michael Frayn, The Russian Interpreter

“But that one single soul was emperor of the universe, no less than each of us.”
― Michael Frayn, Copenhagen

“Look at your hand. Its structure does not match the structure of assertions, the structure of facts. Your hand is continuous. Assertions and facts are discontinuous.... You lift your index finger half an inch; it passes through a million facts. Look at the way your hand goes on and on, while the clock ticks, and the sun moves a little further across the sky.”
― Michael Frayn, Constructions

“Cambridge produces in abundance talents with the ability to please, but few with that greater ability to disregard whether they please or not.”
― Michael Frayn

“The third week of June, and there it is again: the same almost embarrassing familiar breath of sweetness that comes every year about this time. I catch it on the warm evening air as I walk past the well-ordered gardens in my quiet street, and for a moment I am a child again and everything before me - all of the frightening, half-understood promises of life.”
― Michael Frayn, Spies

“I beg your pardon?" says Howard.

Freddie clears his throat, and forces himself to look Howard in the eye.

"I said, I'm God."

He folds his arms very tightly, and looks away over Howard's shoulder. He is plainly embarrassed. So is Howard. He is embarrassed to have embarrassed Freddie.

"I'm terribly sorry," says Howard.

"Can't be helped," says Freddie. "Just one of those things."

"I mean, I'm sorry not to have known."

"Not at all. I'm sorry I had to spring it on you like that."

There is an awkward silence. Freddie fiddles with his biscuit, breaking it into small pieces, and dropping crumbs which catch in the hairy surface of his trousers.

"Well," says Howard. "Congratulations."

"Oh," says Freddie. "Thanks."
----------
The more Howard thinks about it, the less he knows where to look or what to do with his hands. He tries putting them behind his back and looking at the floor, smiling reflectively. Freddie is having difficulties, too. He puts his dry biscuit down, and with his left hand seizes his right elbow. With his right hand he takes hold of his chin. Then he, too, examines the floor.

"On second thoughts," he says, "I don't know about congratulations. Not like being elected to a fellowship, or whatever. Wasn't open to other candidates, you see.”
― Michael Frayn, Sweet Dreams

“Early spring, yes. It's one of those cautiously hopeful days at the beginning of April, after the clocks have made their great leap forward but before the weather or the more suspicious trees have quite had the courage to follow them, and Kate and I are traveling north in a car crammed with food and books and old saucepans and spare pieces of furniture.”
― Michael Frayn, Headlong

“Tessa liked her, in a dreary sort of way – the sort of way one liked picking one’s nails or staying in bed all morning.”
― Michael Frayn, Towards the End of the Morning

“For the first time, Manning felt frightened. It was an indefinite fear, of being small and vulnerable among large forces that were indifferent to him.”
― Michael Frayn, The Russian Interpreter

“I can understand, he said, that many people, many perfectly ordinary people, have an interesting story to tell. No one's experience of life is valueless.”
― Michael Frayn, The Russian Interpreter

“You never had the slightest conception of what happens when bombs are dropped on cities. Even conventional bombs. None of you ever experienced it. Not a single one of you. I walked back from the centre of Berlin to the suburbs one night, after one of the big raids. No transport moving, of course. The whole city on fire. Even the puddles in the streets are burning. They’re puddles of molten phosphorus. It gets on your shoes like some kind of incandescent dog-muck—I have to keep scraping it off—as if the streets have been fouled by the hounds of hell. It would have made you laugh—my shoes keep bursting into flame. All around me, I suppose, there are people trapped, people in various stages of burning to death. And all I can think is, How will I ever get hold of another pair of shoes in times like these?”

Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. “Copenhagen”
― Michael Frayn, Copenhagen

“She wandered moodily about the clearing, kicking at the grass, then bent down and picked something up. It was an old steel helmet, thick with rust, a jagged hole in the side.
You still find these all over the woods, she said. I'm not even sure whether it's Russian or German.
She turned it slowly over and over in her hands, crumbling more of the rusty metal off. Then she hurled it away and brushed the rust off her hands. The helmet hit a tree, bounced off in a shower of rust and fell into a bramble bush where it perched on a a branch, bobbing up and down like some great brown bird alighting. Raya seemed to be abashed by the ridiculousness of it, and picked it out of the bush. They sat down side by side on a fallen tree trunk sodden, like everything else, with the stored wetness of winter. Raya turned the helmet over in her hands again, feeling its texture curiously.
Poor old helmet, she said, Manufactured and issued and worn and punctured and lost and rusted by the forces of historical necessity. Found and touched and lost again by Raissa P. metelius, lecturer.”
― Michael Frayn, The Russian Interpreter

“Heisenberg’s biographer, David Cassidy, posed a large and testing question about Heisenberg’s behaviour before and during the war: How was it possible that Werner Heisenberg, one of the most gifted of modern physicists, a man educated in the finest tradition of Western culture, who was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi supporter, how was it possible that such a man would not only choose to remain in National Socialist Germany for its entire twelve years of existence, but also actively seek a prominent academic position in Berlin at the height of the war, a position that included the scientific directorship of nuclear fission research for the German Army at war?56 It’s a question, obviously, that is asked in hindsight.”
― Michael Frayn, Copenhagen