A.L. Kennedy > Quotes

“Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and ­irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won't need to take notes.”
― A.L. Kennedy

“Have more humility. Remember you don't know the limits of your own abilities. Successful or not, if you keep pushing beyond yourself, you will enrich your own life – and maybe even please a few strangers.”
― A.L. Kennedy

“A good roast of sun, it slows you, lets you relax–and out here if there's anything wrong, you can see it coming with bags of time to do what's next. This is the place and the weather for peace, for the cultivation of a friendly mind.”
― A.L. Kennedy, Day

“You can look at the words on this paper and, because they are the ones I am used to choosing, they will show you the shape of me. I am here to be read in the way you might read the impression of my weight in a bed after a still night, a restless night, a night not alone.”
― A. L. Kennedy, Original Bliss

“Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.”
― A.L. Kennedy

“I can't help it either, the laughing: solemn gatherings, slow
ballads, pompous orations, any person or occasion that assumes I'll
offer my unreserved respect: I tend to find them all hysterical in the
end. Especially if someone similar is there to set me off. They don't
have to do much: I recognize what it looks like when somebody's
composure starts to strip itself away. They'll maybe cross their arms
with that twitchy, shaky, tension, or they'll grab down little wheezes
of embarrassed air, or they'll simply hood their faces under their
palm, trying to hide how fast they're slipping, how fast *we're*
slipping, because I'll be weakening with them by then, I'll be just as
lost, pulled equally tight against the moment when we both stop caring
and let it disgrace us -- when we laugh.”
― A.L. Kennedy, Indelible Acts

“We are not all connected. We are bags of skin. We are all separate bags of thinking skin.”
― A.L. Kennedy, What Becomes

“There are times when you've personally known things to misfire--the sentence that fell badly, the dull gift, slapdash comment, hobbled punch line, tight-fisted tip--trying to be too stupid, trying to be too clever, too silly, too carefree, too caring, too free. You can think back to those long and hollow pauses when you realised that you'd misjudged a mood, weren't paying attention, had taken the wrong risk.”
― A.L. Kennedy, The Blue Book

“It was lovely being out of his mind, very roomy. Now he could go anywhere he liked.”
― A.L. Kennedy, Original Bliss

“Being me is a job — is labour so time-consuming and expensive that I have to have a second job just to support it. So that I can drink, I have to get drink and that isn’t something people give away and then there’s drink that I need because I have drunk and the other drink I have to keep around because, sooner or later, I will drink it. That’s a full-time occupation: that’s like being a miner, or a nurse.”
― A.L. Kennedy, Paradise

“The smell of her in the bedroom. Same thing you'd get when you hugged her, or rolled over onto her pillow when she wasn't there. Frank had seen men hug their wives, the way they'd fit their chin down over the woman's shoulder and there would be this smile, a particular young-seeming grin with closed eyes - always made him think - bliss. ”
― A L Kennedy

“If ever the difficulties of your life seem overwhelming, consider the prospect of being eaten alive by savage penguins and rejoice that such horrors are unknown to you.”
― A.L. Kennedy, Now That You're Back

“Perhaps i am a masochist.
No. Not Possible. If I were basically a masochist then most of my life would have been just nothing but concentrated fun. Every time I woke up, bleeding from my heart and soul, I’d find myself barely able to hide my joy.”
― A.L. Kennedy, Everything You Need

“The Doctor looked at her, completely serious, and said very kindly and softly, 'Oh, I'm incredibly scared most of the time, you know. No one with even a basic knowledge of the universe wouldn't be - it's a completely terrifying place. And enormous. But it's also wonderful and lovely and more interesting than you could possibly imagine. Even than I could possibly imagine. It never lets me down. And I get to be alive in it all and to be scared and amazed and delighted and... I wouldn't be without it.' Then he adjusted his hat and grinned, playing the fool again.”
― A.L. Kennedy, Doctor Who: The Drosten's Curse

“I am delicate and the world is impossibly wrong, is unthinkable and I am not forewarned, forearmed, equipped. I cannot manage. If there was something useful I could do, I would - but there isn't. So I drink.”
― A.L. Kennedy

“The right wrist, because I'm right-handed - so that must be the one that's done most wrong. Although, now that I think, my sins have mostly been ambidextrous.”
― A.L. Kennedy, Everything You Need

“There, there, dear, we're sorry that you'll keep on being you. It's rotten, but what are the choices...?”
― A.L. Kennedy, Serious Sweet

“I like cautious people. They are like me. Not that I like me.”
― A.L. Kennedy, Serious Sweet

“He could feel himself gladly abandoning sanity.”
― A.L. Kennedy, Original Bliss

“Breathing is supposed to keep you calm, but also it keeps you alive and so you are not calm, because you are alive and being alive is never calm.”
― A.L. Kennedy, Serious Sweet

“I end up discussing the weather when the weather is all around us and both I and whoever the stranger might be must surely have noticed it. We would be better off asking each other if our faces are still there.”
― A.L. Kennedy, Now That You're Back

“And I really shouldn't think about politics, and who should, frankly?
Who should willingly waste their time on that? Politics is just an organised and expensive way of being furious.”
― A.L. Kennedy, Serious Sweet

“An effective short story, or piece of flash fiction, delivers the impact of a novel in only a few thousand words, or only a few hundred. It is a singularity, a moment of remarkable meeting between reader and writer.”
― A.L. Kennedy

“He found it remarkable that humans could persuade themselves to keep going under almost any circumstances and that they were very willing to be joyful and courageous. It was a shame so many of them were so stupid.”
― A.L. Kennedy, The Little Snake

“Love is a terrible thing.’
‘So it seems,’ whispered Lanmo.
‘But it is also wonderful.’
‘Perhaps.”
― A.L. Kennedy, The Little Snake

“As every languageless, stateless, selfless nation has one last, twisted image of its worst and best, we have the ceilidh. Here we pretend we are Highland, pretend we have mysteries in our work, pretend we have work. We forget our record of atrocities wherever we have been made masters and become comfortable servants again. Our present and our past creep in to change each other and we feel angry and sad and Scottish. Perhaps we feel free.”
― A. L. Kennedy

“Toreros must also be accustom themselves to a career which will inevitably involve injury by goring: sometimes serious, if not grotesque, goring. No matter what your personal opinion of the corrida may happen to be, these facts are inescapable: in the corrida, bulls and men meet fear and pain and both may die.”
― A.L. Kennedy, On Bullfighting

“But the silent majority and I do have one memorial, at least. The Disaster. We have small lives, easily lost in foreign droughts, or famines; the occasional incendiary incident, or a wall of pale faces, crushed against grillwork, one Saturday afternoon in Spring. This is not enough.”
― A.L. Kennedy, Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains

“Writers' trousers are famously unpredictable in many ways, but I haven't met another author whose trousers simply disintegrated en route to a reading. There I was, young and nervous and not wearing a frock due to poor body image issues, stuck on a late afternoon train, leafing through my notes in a preparatory way and yet also feeling, somehow, chilly.”
― A.L. Kennedy

“She gathered a stiff breath and forced out something she hoped might be what she believed she thought, or hoped she thought, or hoped he thought, or just something someone might have thought at some time when they were trying to make sense of something.”
― A.L. Kennedy, Original Bliss