F.G. Cottam > Quotes

“Magic is a door to which we have lost the key. But the door is there.”
― F.G. Cottam, The Memory of Trees

“He smoked a last cigarette before his departure from them. His faith considered that one a tolerable vice.”
― F.G. Cottam, The Colony

“What would Katie say about the contents of the book in my hand, given me by a woman after whom I lusted, someone I’d only met on the recommendation of a ghost?”
― F.G. Cottam, The Going and the Rise

“And what on earth would be the point of a Devil, my friends, without a God?”
― F.G. Cottam, The House of Lost Souls

“Her flat was small, it was true, but they didn’t want the space to be apart.”
― F.G. Cottam, The House of Lost Souls

“Through the rain, on the other side of the road, he
recognized one of his students hurrying along in a parka, a watch-cap pulled down to protect his elaborately-razored hair from the rain.
One of his ridiculous students, he thought, nostalgic again, this time for the old days when higher education wasn’t a universal right imposed by the government to massage down youth unemployment figures. As recently as the eighties you had to be clever to qualify for a university place. The dullard over the road was living proof that this was no longer the case.”
― F.G. Cottam, The Memory of Trees

“Life became so cheap as to be permanently debased. Faith was destroyed. Now, sensation and novelty are all. If the times we live in were a man, he would be a corpse, a frenzied, ersatz existence galvanised into him only by odd jolts of electricity. What were those lines of Eliot’s? I had not thought death had undone so many.”
― F.G. Cottam, The House of Lost Souls

“And writers didn’t need qualifications. They just needed subjects to claim to be writing about.”
― F.G. Cottam, The House of Lost Souls

“the sad, incurious lives lived for the sake of existence alone, without change or improvement or hope.”
― F.G. Cottam, The House of Lost Souls

“He was someone who thought of a round of golf as a wilderness experience. Lassiter”
― F.G. Cottam, The Colony