James Lasdun > Quotes

“People are always in various stages of different dramas when you encounter them: freshly embarked on some, halfway or more through others. One is always approaching the denouement of this or that subplot of one’s life. And you, the stranger, entering the picture in all your blundering innocence, may well be the catalyst for some long-awaited climax.”
― James Lasdun, Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked

“She waded into the water, splashing it on her waist and shoulders before kicking herself free of the ground and plunging in. She swam out from the shore, covering yards with each thrust of her strong arms and legs. Her body churned the water into bronze scoops and billows that fanned out behind her, tiger-striping the surface with big ripples. Jackson watched her, his mind a jumble of desire and misgivings: the free abandon with which she plunged and twisted in the water had in it something distantly threatening as well as graceful. A dangerous self-sufficiency.”
― James Lasdun

“I thought of the three of us—myself, Trumilcik, and Elaine—each present there via our more or less phantasmagorical versions of each other, our recondite emblems of ourselves. And for a moment I felt I was at the point of grasping what it was that made the full unfolding of another human being into one’s consciousness so painfully dazzling that one spent one’s life contriving ways of filtering them, blocking them out, setting up labyrinthine passageways between oneself and them, kidnapping their images for various exploitative purposes of one’s own, and generally doing all one could to fend off their problematic, objective reality. The phone rang.”
― James Lasdun, The Horned Man: A Novel

“Everyone could work hard under the right conditions, and it was possible to enjoy hard work, even the most numbing, backbreaking toil. But you had to have a sense of participating in some greater good than just the maintaining of your own small existence; some human quorum or congregation of a size sufficient to align you with the world instead of against it. The imagination had to be fired, and kept alight. The heart had to feel the presence of joy and warmth. He”
― James Lasdun, The Fall Guy

“Clearly I missed the story," I muttered.”
― James Lasdun, Afternoon of a Faun

“I found it difficult to look at him at that moment.”
― James Lasdun, Afternoon of a Faun

“Something—his slightly abnormal shortness, I suppose—made me suddenly think that, like many people who abuse their power over others, he had carried into adulthood some ancient sense of himself as a victim. I felt certain that he saw himself as the weaker party here; entitled—even obliged—to use any weapon he could: that he wasn’t so much trying to possess the girl as conducting an ongoing act of defiance against the hand nature had dealt him as a physical specimen; a hand that appeared to have ruled beauty of the order this girl possessed forever out of reach. But although I sympathized with him for this, I held him entirely responsible for what he was doing.”
― James Lasdun, The Horned Man: A Novel

“...for a moment he seemed to see himself as if in a dreamlike film, surrounded by kindred spirits at the warm center of some bustling enterprise in which food, wine, starlight, warm breezes and the sounds of human conviviality combined like the elements of some ancient ceremony to plunge the parched spirit back into the flow of life's inexhaustible abundance.”
― James Lasdun, The Fall Guy

“And then finally there was that sense of almost supernatural kinship that exists often between people who seem on the surface quite unalike but whom life conspires to link by a succession of small affinities, creating a bond that exists in a world of its own, requiring neither comment nor confirmation in this world.”
― James Lasdun, The Fall Guy

“He gave a peculiar smile. It seemed intended to be rueful, but some other emotion was hijacking it, warping it into something weirdly triumphant.
"You seemed pretty sure a month ago . . ." I said.
"Well, you have to take a position, don't you? ...”
― James Lasdun, Afternoon of a Faun