Neil > Neil's Quotes

“The couple sat side by side on cushions on the floor, quietly eating breakfast from the low table. They munched in happy and enjoyable silence, of the kind that grows like a vine through the long years of a good marriage, so that when everything that needs to be said has already been pronounced, it is mutually understood that there is an intimate silence that has its own loquacity.”
― Louis de Bernières, Birds Without Wings

“Since Betty was on the pill or took precautions of her own which Graham did not choose to enquire into, the marital bed was untrammelled by tedious prophylaxis so that what Graham had been expecting to find an onerous and even distasteful duty unexpectedly partook of a freedom and absence of restraint that he found exhilerating.”
― Alan Bennett

“Tell him I was too fucking busy-- or vice versa.”
― Dorothy Parker

“The lads I've met in cupid's deadlock
Were - shall we say? - born out of wedlock”
― Dorothy Parker

“Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You

“Each item of business was described in the expansive, flourishing script that Balfour associated in his mind, with a man who could afford to waste his ink on curlicues.”
― Eleanor Catton

“He did apologize profusely. (Does anyone do anything profusely except apologize? Sweat, I guess.)”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“You, minion, are too saucy.”
― William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona

“People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.”
― William Shakespeare