Salley Vickers > Quotes

“It is hard to account for the common human resistance to happiness, unless it is that we would rather be crippled by what we lack than risk the pain that is one potential consequence of placing our secret selves in others' hands...to take delight in being loved requires nerve.

"The Other Side of You”
― Sally Vickers

“We all long for someone with whom we are able to share our peculiar burdens of being alive.”
― Salley Vickers

“You think I'm strong because I sound off and go on about things and am very direct and seem very full of myself...but the truth is, I am much, much feebler than you. I just go on like this to keep my end up. You think what you're doing is right and that gives you strength. You see, I know I'm not right, I know there is no right. The only "right" I am is that I know what I like and what I want, and what I like and what I want is you, more than anyone else in all the world does, or could."

Thomas to Elizabeth "The Other Side of You”
― Sally Vickers

“Stories are all we humans have to make us immortal.”
― Salley Vickers, Where Three Roads Meet: The Myth of Oedipus

“There are few things more mysterious than endings. I mean, for example, when did the Greek gods end, exactly? Was there a day when Zeus waved magisterially down from Olympus and Aphrodite and her lover Ares, and her crippled husband Hephaestus ) I always felt sorry for him), and all the rest got rolled up like a worn-out carpet?”
― Salley Vickers

“He was right because he had grasped the nature of mortality. He had a mind free enough and a heart bold enough to take on board, properly take on board, that just as there are first things so also - it is after all, if we could take it in, implicit - there are last things. That everything in human life tends towards its ending and that any meeting, however full of hope and promise, will be the first stage in a progress towards a last meeting - and that this may happen sooner than we imagine and without fair warning.”
― Salley Vickers

“It's funny how you imagine loving someone is enough to make them believe you love them.
Thomas to Elizabeth, "The Other Side of You”
― Sally Vickers

“Age and disease and death may destroy our physical being but it is other people who get inside us and damage our hearts and minds.

"The Other Side of You”
― Sally Vickers

“The Abbe Paul looked at Agnes rather as Alain had, with respect. 'How sensible. People are desperate to probe mysteries which for the most part are best left unprobed. It is the modern curse: this demented drive to explain every blessed thing. Not everything can be explained. Nor should be, I think.”
― Salley Vickers, The Cleaner of Chartres

“Then it was she saw him again. On the upper reaches of the scaffolding, a sheerness of presence, no more. It was as if he took the space from the air about him and against the darkness was etched, like the brightness which seeps through a door ajar, hinting at nameless, fathomless brilliances beyond, the slightest margin of light. Impossible to look too closely, but some way below, beneath where the long feet might have rested, she made out the girl's huddled shape, her arms folded over her head like some small broken-winged, storm-tossed bird.”
― Salley Vickers, Miss Garnet's Angel

“And I have come to see that the better you treat someone, the more you love them – which is why you must never let someone treat you badly, for the worse they do to you, the more they will hate you. I”
― Salley Vickers, Cousins

“Beware, beware of those who care,’ as some wise person said. Not that I’m suggesting there is anything wrong with caring. But as Granny Maud used to say, ‘Fine words butter no parsnips,’ and she might have added, ‘Caring should be felt and not heard.”
― Salley Vickers, Cousins

“That boy held my heart in a way that felt molecular.”
― Salley Vickers, Cousins

“Full revelation, she couldn't help feeling, was something which was considered a virtue only among the reckless or the cruel.”
― Sally Vickers

“Guilt. Does anyone escape it? Is guilt the reason we make up stories?”
― Salley Vickers, Where Three Roads Meet: The Myth of Oedipus

“I put it to you, Doctor, that our gods are what "good" and "bad" once were before they became categories un human reasoning.”
― Salley Vickers, Where Three Roads Meet: The Myth of Oedipus

“It is itself a kindness to accept kindness, Doctor.”
― Salley Vickers, Where Three Roads Meet: The Myth of Oedipus

“Is it true we'd rather be ruined than changed?”
― Salley Vickers

“There’s always another way. But we can only see as we are. And no power on earth, nor above or below it, not even yours, Dr Freud, can deflect the human will when it has its sights set on one direction.”
― Salley Vickers, Where Three Roads Meet

“we emphatically do not want to find that we have reached such a state of dearth in our society that we must provide food banks for the imagination as well as, as we so regrettably have to do today, for the physical body.”
― Salley Vickers, The Librarian

“Know thyself. Then know that you are a human being, a member of the species of mankind. So know first and foremost that you do not know, and what you claim to know is almost certainly a means of distracting yourself from what you really know.”
― Salley Vickers, Where Three Roads Meet: The Myth of Oedipus

“without great wisdom and strength humankind should pray to be spared the experience of love.”
― Salley Vickers, Mr Golightly’s Holiday: The literary fiction mysterious novel that will keep you guessing

“I need to tease out how far I was to blame. You’ll understand that, Dr Freud. Guilt. Does anyone escape it? Is guilt the reason we make up stories?”
― Salley Vickers, Where Three Roads Meet

“save us both from the trouble that would arise if I was to disturb Mama’s sleep. When”
― Salley Vickers, The Message from Lindisfarne

“We tend not to notice what is not there when often absence is the more vital thing.”
― Salley Vickers, The Cleaner of Chartres

“From the gods’ perspective all ways are the same and all roads will be travelled in the end. It’s only a matter of time.”
― Salley Vickers, Where Three Roads Meet

“he made his story into an immortal one, so far as any story is. — But, Dr Freud, stories are all we humans have to make us immortal. 18 —”
― Salley Vickers, Where Three Roads Meet

“Suddenly, all that was present to me was the two of us, facing the people we had become on the threshold of eternity.”
― Salley Vickers, Reader, She Married Me: A Short Story from the collection, Reader, I Married Him