Patrick McGuinness > Quotes

“To be compromised you need to have a stake in things, you need to have something to lose and something to gain. You have to be risking yourself, not all the time, but enough of the time to be weighing things up, principle over self-preservation, the gains, the losses.”
― Patrick McGuinness

“In diplomacy there are two kinds of problems: small ones and large ones. The small ones will go away by themselves and the large ones you will not be able to do anything about. The biggest challenges in your career will come from the temptation to act. The test of your mettle will be how nobly you surmount it.”
― Patrick McGuinness

“You know the old joke: with communism the future is certain, it’s just the past that keeps changing?”
― Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days

“The night will take the day’s bones and sweat them into dream-stock,”
― Patrick McGuinness, Throw Me to the Wolves

“There’s a bloke describing himself as ‘Husky, dusky and musky’, which Gary says sounds like Snow White’s three sex-offender dwarves.”
― Patrick McGuinness, Throw Me to the Wolves

“The waiter came over to ask if all is delicious. As we have not yet ordered, it is certainly the perfect time to enquire.”
― Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days

“Life in a police state magnifies the small mercies that it leaves alone until they become disproportionate to their significance; at the same time it banalises the worst travesties into mere routine.”
― Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days

“Add the alcohol-blush on the cheeks and the crumbly looking nose with its violet cracks, and you have someone who looks a lot like a dirty puppet. There’s always something that resembles damp breadcrumbs in the creases where the different pieces of his face meet: between jaw and earlobe, nostril and upper lip, eyelid and brow. It’s a yellowish putty at the joins of his features, as if they’ve been mortared together with cheese.”
― Patrick McGuinness, Throw Me to the Wolves

“Leo had once joked about writing an allegorical sketch where Parody packed its bags, shut up shop and put a sign on the door which read: “Closed. Any inquiries please contact the Real”.”
― Patrick McGuinness

“Le patois coule toujours dans l’euro-français, filtré par Bruxelles et émaillé d’anglais : la mwéjon, le tchinisse, vouille et yauk : c’est la ligne de crasse qui résiste au savon, le sable qui diapre le marbre.”
― Patrick McGuinness, Vide-Grenier: Traduit de l'anglais (Grande-Bretagne) par Karine Lalechère

“He was a fundamentalist – a pragmatic one perhaps, but a fundamentalist nonetheless, for whom all the failures of the ideal were due to the misapplication of the ideal, all the barbarity of the system was extraneous to that system and accidental to it. ‘Sophistry’ said Leo later, or to use the technical term, Bollocks.”
― Patrick McGuinness

“What I learned from her was that when the strong break they break irrecoverably because they never cracked, because they never accommodated themselves to what sought to destroy them.”
― Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days

“Then the bridge towards the brownfield outskirts with their stalled cranes, the half-built credit-fuelled flats now credit-crunch-frozen. The designer shops that decline into Pound Shops. Then what Gary calls Brexit-land.”
― Patrick McGuinness, Throw Me to the Wolves

“Kafka’s The Castle came to mind, a book I had not read but that fell into that category of literature that culture reads on your behalf and deposits somewhere inside you.”
― Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days

“Diplomacy : the ability to stare the future in the face without meeting its eye.”
― Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days

“family life had been a good enough schooling in totalitarianism, eking out small permissions, learning to live under the radar of his vengefulness and failure. There can’t have been many people who came to Ceauşescu’s Romania for their first taste of freedom.”
― Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days

“La cour vide Lorsque je parle français à mes enfants, je considère que c’est la langue de ma mère, même si ce n’est plus ma langue maternelle. Ce français, il est chargé d’un manque : le sien, le mien, et ce qu’elle a perdu quand elle me l’a légué, à des continents de l’endroit d’où elle était partie : criblé de trous, à la fois préservé dans la naphtaline et mangé aux mites, l’odeur de conserve et l’odeur de mort au coude à coude. Remisé à la cave pendant des années, il est devenu gras, laiteux, engourdi, ma bouche une soufflerie où résonnait l’écho de sa désuétude. Puis il y avait le retour aux sources, les étés annuels à Bouillon où nous sentions notre belgitude monter en nous comme l’humidité derrière les tapisseries de la maison inhabitée neuf mois sur douze : ses pièces vides, ses placards introuvables, son bric-à-brac rangé et empilé depuis si longtemps que chaque élément oublié s’imbriquait dans le suivant, une savante architecture d’abandon ; l’articulation des mots”
― Patrick McGuinness, Vide-Grenier: Traduit de l'anglais (Grande-Bretagne) par Karine Lalechère