At Last

Quotes

1. Unless in fact he had a very dim memory of her and the photograph had blown on the tiny little ember of his connection with his granny, like a faint orange glow in a heap of soft grey ash, and for a moment he really could remember when he had sat on his granny’s lap and smiled at her and patted her wrinkly old face — his mother said he smiled at her and she was really pleased.

2. 

   When she told people how nervous she was about any kind of public appearance, they said incredibly annoying things like, ‘Don’t forget to breathe.’ Now she knew why.

3. 

   No doubt his grandmother and his great-grandfather had hoped to empower a senator, enrich a great art collection or encourage a dazzling marriage, but in the end they had mainly subsidized idleness, drunkenness, treachery and divorce.

4. 

   Thank goodness there were people who were happy with nothing, thought Julia, so that people like her (and everyone else she had ever met), could have more.

5. 

   Were the ironies of taxation any better: raising money for schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, and spending it on blowing up schools and hospitals and roads and bridges in self-defeating wars?

6. 

   And then he looked down at his fallen opponent, sprawled heavily on the carpet, and somehow the sight of his old neck, no longer festooned with an expensive black silk tie, but wrinkled and sagging and open at the throat, as if waiting for the final dagger thrust, filled him with pity and renewed his respect for the conservative powers of an ego that would rather kill its owner than allow him to change.

7. 

   It was virtually impossible to think of a sentence that made a positive use of that dreadful word ‘enough’, let alone one that started raving about ‘nothing’.

8. 

   Gothic script seemed to warp every letter that passed through the door of the funeral parlour, as if death were a German village.

9. 

   They said it was the only way to stop her running up debts, but the best way to stop her running up debts was to give her more money.

10. 

    How nauseating, thought Nicholas, a Jew being sentimental on behalf of a Negro: you lucky fellows, you’ve got plenty o’ nuthin’, whereas we’re weighted down with all this international capital and these wretched Broadway musical hits.

11. 

    Without speech, thoughts plough on like a train without tracks, buckling, crashing, ripping everything apart.

12. 

    As a guest, Emily Price had three main drawbacks: she was incapable of saying please, incapable of saying thank you and incapable of saying sorry, all the while creating a surge in the demand for these expressions.

13. 

    More./What for? was a rhyme that deserved to be made more often.

14. 

    Death was kind of a boisterous egomaniac that needed no encouragement.

15. 

    But do you know what struck me, apart from Nancy’s vibrant self-pity, which she had the nerve to pretend was grief?

16. 

    Never use a conditional tense when it comes to money.

17. 

    He had brought nothing to read except The Tibetan Book of the Dead, hoping to find its exotic iconography ridiculous enough to purge any fantasies he might still cling to about consciousness continuing after death.

18. 

    It must be hard to be exclusively social and entirely friendless at the same time.

19. 

    The passage he was to read was from Revelations — or Obfuscations, as he preferred to call them. Reading it over on the train from Cambridge, he had felt a strange desire to build a time machine so that he could take the author a copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

20. 

    What did this long-range goodwill mean, and what did it say about the social contract that allowed a rich man to free all of his descendents from the need to work over the course of almost two centuries?

21. 

    As he laboured up to his bedsit, a miniature roof conversion with sloping walls on the fifth floor of a narrow Victorian building in Kensington, Patrick seemed to regress through evolutionary history, growing more stooped with each flight, until he was resting his knuckles on the carpet of the top landing, like an early hominid that has not yet learned to stand upright on the grasslands of Africa and only makes rare and nervous expeditions down from the safety of the trees.

22. 

    He marvelled again at the effect of projection: how hostile Henry had seemed to him when Patrick was hostile towards everyone; how considerate he seemed now that Patrick had no argument with him. What would it be like to stop projecting? Was it possible at all?

23. 

    The tragedy was that five or perhaps ten years of decent five-day-a-week analysis could have mitigated the problem significantly.

24. 

    The idea that an afterlife had been invented to reassure people who couldn’t face the finality of death was no more plausible than the idea that the finality of death had been invented to reassure people who couldn’t face the nightmare of endless experience.

25. 

    Only in a country free from the funnelling of primogeniture and the levelling of égalité could the fifth generation of a family still be receiving parcels of wealth from a fortune that had essentially been made in the 1830s.

26. 

    She glimpsed the pink flowers of a magnolia protesting against the black-and-white half-timbered facade of a mock-Tudor side street.

That’s all the quotes.

26 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more