Dickon Edwards > Dickon's Quotes

“Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature”
― Anita Brookner, A Start in Life

“In his normal state he would not strike a lamb. I’ve known him to do it’
‘Do what?’
‘Not strike lambs”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“A refurbished Star Wars is on somewhere or everywhere. I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned. Twenty years ago, when the film was first shown, it had a freshness, also a sense of moral good and fun. Then I began to be uneasy at the influence it might be having. The first bad penny dropped in San Francisco when a sweet-faced boy of twelve told me proudly that he had seen Star Wars over a hundred times. His elegant mother nodded with approval. Looking into the boy's eyes I thought I detected little star-shells of madness beginning to form and I guessed that one day they would explode.

'I would love you to do something for me,' I said.

'Anything! Anything!' the boy said rapturously.

'You won't like what I'm going to ask you to do,' I said.

'Anything, sir, anything!'

'Well,' I said, 'do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?'

He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. 'What a dreadful thing to say to a child!' she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.”
― Alec Guinness, A Positively Final Appearance

“Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days - such as that day - when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I dreamt about you last night. Fell out of bed twice”
― Shelagh Delaney, A Taste of Honey

“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Although there were moments even still in the grey glint of morning when the room had the agitated, stricken appearance of a person who had changed his creed a thousand times, sighed, stretched himself, turned a complete somersault, sat up, smiled, lay down, turned up his toes and died of doubts. But this aspect was reserved exclusively for the housemaids and the translucent threads of dawn.”
― Ronald Firbank, 3 More Novels: Vainglory, Inclinations, Caprice

“THERE'S NO JUSTICE, said Mort. JUST US.”
― Terry Pratchett, Mort

“She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“And some days, Emira would carry the dread that if Briar ever struggled to find herself, she’d probably just hire someone to do it for her.”
― Kiley Reid, Such a Fun Age

“Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.”
― Quentin Crisp

“The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.”
― Quentin Crisp

“There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.”
― Quentin Crisp

“If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.”
― Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant; How To Become A Virgin; Resident Alien

“Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret. Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.”
― Quentin Crisp

“You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.”
― Quentin Crisp

“The world is disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.”
― Ronald Firbank, Vainglory

“Mentally, perhaps she was already three parts glass. So intense was her desire to set up a commemorative window to herself that, when it was erected, she believed she must leave behind in it, for ever, a little ghost. And should this be so, then what joy to be pierced each morning with light; her body flooded through and through by the sun, or in the evening to glow with a harvest of dark colours, deepening into untold sadness with the night....
What ecstasy! It was the Egyptian sighing for his pyramid, of course.”
― Ronald Firbank, 3 More Novels: Vainglory, Inclinations, Caprice

“I adore italics, don't you?”
― Ronald Firbank

“Sections in the bookstore

- Books You Haven't Read
- Books You Needn't Read
- Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading
- Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written
- Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
- Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First
- Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait 'Til They're Remaindered
- Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback
- Books You Can Borrow from Somebody
- Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too
- Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages
- Books You've Been Hunting for Years Without Success
- Books Dealing with Something You're Working on at the Moment
- Books You Want to Own So They'll Be Handy Just in Case
- Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer
- Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves
- Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
- Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Re-read
- Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

“the music expressed life and explained it and left you having to ask again.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

“He seemed to fade pretty quickly. He found himself yearning to know of their affairs, their successes, the novels and the new ideas that the few who remembered him might say he never knew, he never lived to find out.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

“And going into the showers I saw a suntanned young lad in pale blue trunks that I rather liked the look of.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library

“Loving him was all interpretation, creative in its way. We barely used language at all to communicate: he sulked and thought I was putting him down if I made complicated remarks, and sometimes I felt numb at the compromise and self-suppression I submitted to. Yet beyond that it was all guesswork; we were thinking for two. The darkened air of the flat was full of the hints we made. The stupidity and the resentment were dreadful at times. But then in sex he lost his awkwardness. He shows his capacity to change as I rambled over him now with my fingertips and watched him glow and gulp with desire; his clothes seemed to shrivel off him and he lay there making his naked claim for the only certainty in his life. It wasn't something learnt, I suspected, from the guys before me who'd picked him up and fucked him and fucked him around. It was a kind of gift for giving, and while he did whatever I wanted it emerged as the most important thing there was for him. It was all the harder, then, when the resentment returned and I longed for him to go.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library

“Spoiler Alert: We all die in the end”
― Salena Godden, Mrs Death Misses Death