Novelists From England

"“She encouraged herself to see her very small presence in the world as a good thing, a power, something that a hero might possess.”"

"“A library at night is full of sounds: the unread books can't stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious.”"

"“In Narnia a girl might ring a bell in a deserted temple and feel the chime in her eyes, pure as the freeze that forces tears. Then when the sound dies out, the White Witch wakes. It was like, I want to touch you, and I can touch you, now what next, a dagger?”"

"”Jess shrank, her arms raised protectively over her head in anticipation of another blow. Her dad spoke tentatively from behind her: ‘Sarah, I was handling that ...’" (Page 326)"

""Once you let people know anything about what you think, that's it, you're dead. Then they'll be jumping about in your mind, taking things out, holding them up to the light and killing them, yes, killing them, because thoughts are supposed to stay and grow in quiet, dark places, like butterflies in cocoons”. (Page 82)"

""The truth shall set you free” (Chapter 11, Page 86)"

""‘You weren’t, though! If that had been my father ’handling that’, she would’ve been flat on the floor with a few teeth missing!’” (Page 198)"

""Maybe Jessamy has all these 'attacks' because she can't make up her mind whether she's black or white!" (Chapter 2, Page 13)"

""Wuraola sounded like another person. Not her at all. Should she answer to this name, and by doing so steal the identity of someone who belonged here?” (Part 1, Chapter 4, Page 28)"

""Who is this woman who has a Nigerian maiden name in a British passport, who stands here wearing denim shorts and a strappy yellow top, with a white man and a half-and-half child?" (Chapter 2, Page 12)"

""Jess’s father is upset and confused, saying to Jess’s grandfather, “One minute you’re telling her to think on Jesus and the next you’re calling a witch doctor!” (Page 236)."

""In Nigeria, her mother had said, children were always getting themselves into mischief, and surely that was better than sitting inside reading and staring into space all day.” (Part 1, Chapter 3, Page 21)"

""well, out of place. His face was wet with perspiration and flushed pink, and even the way that he stood marked him out as different." (Chapter 1, Page 9)"

""He was looking at her, but in a distracted manner, as if she was something to look at while he waited for something else.”(Page 15)"

""England, where people who stared at you would shift their eyes away with an embarrassed, smiling gesture if you stared back. England, where people didn’t see you, where it was almost rude to, wrong to.” (Page 16)"

""Jesus doesn’t have lips as big as yours, and his skin is fair. How can you ever be as good as him on the outside when there’s nothing of him on your face?” (Page 246)"

"“I've read that madness is present when everything you see and hear takes on an equal significance. A dead bird makes you cry, and so does a doorknob.”"

"“I was born, and then I was quietly resentful of that fact for a few years...but then I went to a library and it was okay.”"

"“If you should find yourself in a place that is indifferent to you and there is someone there that your spirit stretches to, then that person is kin.”"

"The only way to try and interrogate or possibly persuade stories to reveal something about themselves is to make all these provocations and assaults on them, and try and unpack them and unpick their seams and see if they react."

"“... it's not whiteness itself that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness. Same goes if you swap whiteness out for other things-- fancy possessions for sure, pedigree, maybe youth too... we beat Them (and spare ourselves a lot of tedium and terror) by declining to worship.”"

"“And without further argument he unsheathed the sword and cleaved Miss Foxe's head from her neck. He knew what was supposed to happen. He knew that this awkward, whispering creature before him should now transform into a princess - dazzlingly beautiful, free, and made wise by her hardship."

"“And she walked away, and she walked away, and that was that, and that was that.”"

"“The general advice is always be yourself, be yourself, which only makes sense if you haven't got an attitude problem.”"

"“To you who eat a lot of rice because you are lonely"

""It was Nigeria. That was the problem. Nigeria felt ugly." (Part 1, Chapter 1, Page 6)"

"I also love books of people learning to do this like going to ballet school, or how to ride horses. There's just something about the process and setback's it's very interesting."

""Please tell me a story about a girl who gets away." I would, even if I had to adapt one, even if I had to make one up just for her. "Gets away from what, though?" "From her fairy godmother. From the happy ending that isn't really happy at all. Please have her get out and run off of the page altogether, to somewhere secret where words like 'happy' and 'good' will never find her." "You don't want her to be happy and good?" "I'm not sure what's really meant by happy and good. I would like her to be free. Now. Please begin." White for Witching (2010) p 165"

"“...a place can live in you without letting you know about it for the longest time.” Parasol Against the Axe (2024)"

"“But then, maybe “I don’t believe in you” is the cruelest way to kill a monster.”"

"“For reasons of my own I take note of the way people act when they’re around mirrors.”"

"“With boys there was a fundamental assumption that they had a right to be there—not always, but more often than not. With girls, Why her? came up so quickly.”"

"Nothing else much matters once you have achieved the hardest thing, which is to act out of conviction. Even if you have been beaten by evil, in the bitterness of defeat the battle has left a trace for the others, and you can go feeling clean. I recognise that I am a minor writer; but this does not affect the depth of my convictions."

"Existence is sometimes what a forward artillery observer sees of enemy lines through field glasses. A distant and troubling view brought suddenly into focus with a wealth of obscene detail."

"The black novel seeks to present as forcibly as it can the terminal psychic situation that occurs in people who have arrived at a point where they have no hope, no motive, and no longer even the desire to conceal anything from themselves; the black novel intervenes at the moment where a human being approaches his last moment: The first night of death must seem so strange. A special mood is necessary to make language plastic enough to convey such experience exactly; experience so devastatingly simple that, like love, it verges on the indescribable. Nearly every attempt to convey it can really only be described as another in a seemingly endless series of attempts since we cannot describe what we are not yet in a position to know — and yet it is the black novel's absolute duty to express it. T. S. Eliot, I think, got closest to describing the nature of this challenge when he wrote (I paraphrase): It is not necessary to die to describe death."

"By the word existence I mean the one contract valid for mankind; I define it as the general contract. In it are the clauses of human life; its uses, responsibilities, limitations, its inevitable eclipse. This contract is the basis of the black novel, whose loathing of violence, which it describes as precisely as possible in order to remind people how disgusting it is, causes it to rise up against death forced on any person before his time, and that is where it becomes a novel in mourning. Each contract is to be terminated in the way that its clauses are set out; but it is not to be destroyed by any contract-holder. That possibility is contained in no contract. To break his contract is either to invite the breaker's destruction, or else it is evidence that the act of destruction has been carried out by a signatory who has already been destroyed, such as a killer — and that is why my detective picks up Suarez' battered head and kisses it. I will go further. What is remarkable about I Was Dora Suarez has nothing to do with literature at all; what is remarkable about it is that in its own way and by its own route it struggles after the same message as Christ. I am not the kind of person that anyone would expect to say such a thing, for although I believe firmly in the invisible, I am not religious. But in writing the book I definitely underwent an experience that I can only describe as cathartic; the writing of Suarez, though plunging me into evil, became the cause of my seeking to purge what was evil in myself. It was only after I had finished the book that I realised this; I was far too deeply involved in the battle with evil that the book became to think any further than that at the time [...] Suarez was my atonement for fifty years' indifference to the miserable state of this world; it was a terrible journey through my own guilt, and through the guilt of others."

"Then we sat in silence, watching the scenery whirring past us in the improving light. I was lighting us both a cigarette when he turned to me and said: 'Sorry if I got cross, morrie.' 'That's all right,' I said. 'Bit on edge, I suppose.' It was all very kosher and British. 'Not surprising,' I said. 'It's been an angstful sort of night.'"

"'You're not very good at it, are you?' said Gust, 'they ought to have sent heavies in.' He thought the man very likely could have got a job playing Hess in this new TV series they were doing on the war, and he would have had a word with a few directors he knew in Soho if he had been a mate of his. But, as he wasn't, Gust kicked him in the stomach as he tried to drag himself up on one leg with the help of the bar-rail, then turned back to the other man. 'You all right?' he said. 'How are you feeling now? Chipper?' He took one of the man's ears in his thumb and forefinger; the ear was tiny, considering the size of his head, and it had little hairs inside it. Gust picked up a cocktail stick out of a dirty glass on the bar and jabbed it down into the eardrum as far as he could; when he pulled it out the stick was half-way red, and there was some grey stuff in it as well. He shouted down his ear: 'I think I just broke your foot!' but the man wasn't making sense any more; he was wailing with his hand clapped to the side of his head, swaying up and down from the waist like a bereaved widow, or else perhaps he just didn't hear, or maybe the music was too loud. Gust realised then that he had pushed the stick in too far and that the man would probably die. Dirty cocktail-stick in the brain? What a bleeding way to go! Now the man with the broken leg tried another naughty stroke; although he only had one hand free because he was using the other one to hold onto the rail, he still managed to smash a glass and try putting it in Gust's face. 'This is just self-defence after all,' Gust said to himself. He stamped on the man's feet again; this time he definitely felt bones go and the man screamed, dropped the glass and let go of the rail; but instead of letting him fall Gust took him round the waist, ripped his fly open and searched inside his pants until he found his testicles, which he yanked right out into his hand. Their owner can't have been much into baths because they smelled like something tepid from a canteen counter. Gust wrung them like the devil having a go at a set of wedding bells with all the grip he had, until the man was shrieking on the same D minor as the music. 'It's nothing personal,' said Gust, 'but I'm afraid you're going to have to learn to fuck all over again.' He wiped the blood off the man's prick down his face, then pulled the face towards him and drove his nose into his brain with his head. The music boosted into E major on a key change, and the man doubled up under a bar-stool, leaving a lot of blood behind him while Gust receded into the half darkness towards the black drapes on the walls."

"The bore is the human cuckoo. He will take over anything, usurp any nest. His one outstanding feature is that he has no features. He has nothing whatever to offer society, not the least germ of an original or positive idea – and yet the rest of us somehow find ourselves moving up to make room for him, just as the body makes itself host to a destructive virus. Bores would take the entire world over if they could; sometimes they do. Here is an extract from the diary of one who did: 'I still lack to a considerable degree that naturally superior kind of manner that I would dearly like to possess…' (Heinrich Himmler, November 1921)."

"It seems to me that no matter whether you marry, settle down or live with a bird or not, certain ones simply have your number on them, like bombs in the war; and even if you don't happen to like them all that much there's nothing you can do about it – unless you're prepared to spend a lifetime arguing fate out of existence, which you could probably do if you tried but I'm not the type."

"“There is no truth to peace,” she said. “Peace is at best a brief interlude between hostilities. The treaties which might be signed here are no more than lies. The field of battle is more honest.”"

"Walking through a library—any library—as they made their way to the exterior had its usual comforting, balancing effect on Irene. It was a reassurance that such places existed and that they would continue, even if she herself was as temporary as any other human."

"The room on the other side was elegant and gracious, even in the moonlight that slanted in through the long rectangular windows. It breathed with the scent of old books and wax polish: the dark volumes that filled the shelves promised countless secrets, and Irene itched just to reach out and touch them."

"Sometimes the obvious answer is the true answer."

"“What business is it of mine if they should want to kill each other? I’d say they both show excellent judgement.” “Sounds about right to me,” Evariste said harshly. “Not my circus, not my monkeys. If they want to tear each other to bits, they can get on with it, and good luck to them.”"

"She was trying to work out who these men were working for. Were they Qing Song’s minions, random gangsters, specific gangsters, or undercover police? So many enemies, so little time."

"First things first. Get the facts, then decide what to do next. And hope that there is a next."

"What is written can be erased, alas."

"And, really, Erda had put the basic problem in a nutshell. Everyone here viewed damage to their own particular interest as more significant than damage to anyone else’s. Whatever the scale of the damage."

"Irene didn’t need Vale’s deductive skills to tell her she was in trouble. But there was something liberating about this. She was surrounded by known enemies, not politics. And she didn’t have anyone to worry about—apart from herself."