Memoirists From England

"What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That's the size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable."

"My heart returns to me what I turn away. I am my own master but not always master of myself."

"The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests."

"Yes I will come for you. Roll my strength into a ball for you. Throw myself across chance for you. I will be the bridge or the pulley because you are the dream."

"They were letting off fireworks down at the waterfront, the sky exploding in grenades of colour. Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty - even for a moment - it is enough."

"In the West, we avoid painful encounters with art by trivialising it, or by familiarising it. Our present obsession with the past has the double advantage of making new work seem raw and rough compared to the cosy patina of tradition, whilst refusing tradition its vital connection to what is happening now."

"If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much in use for it."

"When was the last time you looked at anything, solely, and concentratedly, and for its own sake? Ordinary life passes in a near blur. If we go to the theatre or the cinema, the images before us change constantly, and there is the distraction of language. Our loved ones are so well known to us that there is no need to look at them, and one of the gentle jokes of married life is that we do not."

"Misery is a vacuum. A space without air, a suffocated dead place, the abode of the miserable. Misery is a tenement block, rooms like battery cages, sit over your own droppings, lie on your own filth. Misery is a no U-turns, no stopping road. Travel down it pushed by those behind, tripped by those in front. Travel down it at furious speed though the days are mummified in lead. It happens so fast once you get started, there's no anchor from the real world to slow you down, nothing to hold on to. Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall. Whatever your private hell, you'll find millions like it in Misery. This is the town where everyone's nightmares come true."

"In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of Anna Karenina? 'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.' In fact it's the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalisation. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable."

"There are those who say that temptation can be barricaded beyond the door. The ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don't look, don't smell, don't dream."

"Why is the measure of love... loss? pg.9"

"That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces of the loft that the air was all driven away. The lovers suffocated, but when the sacristan opened the tiny door the worlds tumbled him over in their desire to be free, and were seen flying across the city in the shape of doves. (p.13)"

"Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle."

"No safety without risk, and what you risk reveals what you value."

"Religion is somewhere between fear and sex. And God? Truly? In his own right, without our voices speaking for him? Obsessed I think, but not passionate. (p.74)"

"He's a curious man; a shrug of the shoulders and a wink and that's him. He's never thought it odd that his daughter cross-dresses for a living and sells second-hand purses on the side. But then, he's never thought it odd that his daughter was born with webbed feet. (p.61)"

"We didn't build our bridges simply to avoid walking on water. Nothing so obvious. A bridge is a meeting place. A neutral place. A casual place. Enemies will choose to meet on a bridge and end their quarrel in that void...For lovers, a bridge is a possibility, a metaphor of their chances. And for the traffic in whispered goods, where else but a bridge in the night? (p.57)"

"What you risk reveals what you value. (p.91)"

"Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not. You play, you win, you play, you lose, you play. (p.73)"

"No second chances at a single moment."

"Do all lovers feel helpless and valiant in the presence of the beloved? Helpless because the need to roll over like a pet dog is never far away. Valiant because you know you would slay a dragon with a pocket knife if you had to."

"I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does."

"My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else."

"He doesn't understand I want the freedom to make my own mistakes."

"I'm telling you stories. Trust me."

"Somewhere between fear and sex passion is. The way there is sudden. The way out is worse."

"Bask in it. In spite of what the monks say, you can meet God without getting up early. You can meet God lounging in the pew. The hardship is a man-made device because man cannot exist without passion."

"A sense of social hierarchy prevented Mrs Munde from actually telling the lousy bastard to get out, so instead she began to think evil thoughts. She had once read an article on mind control, explaining that the best way to bend someone to your will was to think of a gooey mudlike substance called Cliff Richard and direct it at the object of your intent. Such were the marshmellow-suffocating properties of this image that the victim fell instantly into an undignified froth. Putty in your hands in fact. It didn't seem to work. The stranger was insensitive as well as intrusive. Mrs Munde gave it one last go till the kitchen air was thick with Cliff Richard. The stranger suddenly made a little squeaking noise and fell sideways."

"She thought of an article she had once seen on mind control. Apparently if there was a person fiendish enough to set about interfering with your life, the only thing you could do was to concentrate hard on someone they were unlikely ever to have heard of called Martin Amis. The particular blankness of this image was guaranteed to protect from any subtle force, but Gloria realised with a sinking heart that it was too late now."

"The curious are always in some danger."

"Here is some advice. If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches ...."

"Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one."

"But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that."

"I have always had the joy of life, uncrushably, a sort of inner sunshine that cannot be put out."

"If you ever think I am over-exuberant, too unconventional, too outspoken, remember that life has not blunted me nor made me blasé or indifferent, that all things are still a joy and of interest to me because of that secret source of enchantment that flows within me - the joy of life!"

"Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, A medley of extemporanea, And love is a thing that can never go wrong And I am Marie of Roumania."

"I have met [a proselytizer from a religious group]. I did not like him. He seemed to me to be a snob. He spoke of God as if He were the oldest title in the Almanach de Gotha. And all that business about telling one's sins in public -- He wanted me … me … to get up before my children and confess everything I had ever done! It is spiritual nudism! Ça se ne fait pas."

"It is like a wide embrace gathering all those who have long searched for words of hope… Saddened by the continual strife amongst believers of many confessions and wearied of their intolerance towards each other, I discovered in the Bahá'í teaching the real spirit of Christ so often denied and misunderstood."

"No Prime Minister, either before or since, could compare with Ted Heath in the efforts he made to establish a spirit of camaraderie with trade unions and to offer an attractive package which might satisfy large numbers of work people. At the outset I thought he represented the hard face of the Tory party but over the years he revealed the human face of Toryism, at least to the trade union leaders who met him frequently. It is doubtful whether the public gained that view of him, partly because, as he himself admitted at one of the Downing Street meetings, he was a bad communicator. Amazingly, he gained more personal respect from union leaders than they seemed to have for Harold Wilson, or even Jim Callaghan."

"Heath...was passionately committed on the merits of the issue. He waged an extremely effective campaign, and my respect for him, already considerable at the beginning, went steadily up as it progressed. Yet he was always a difficult morsel to digest. He never tried to be awkward, but there was a certain inherent awkwardness about his character and indeed his physique. He stood resolutely there, as impervious to the waves and as reliable in his beam as a great lighthouse, but sometimes blocking the way. But he was never negligible. ... [H]e was dependable and powerful."

"[T]here was among ordinary Tories in the country a more generalised mood of mounting frustration at the failure of successive Conservative Governments to halt or reverse what seemed a relentless one-way slide to socialism. Not only in the management of the economy but in almost every sphere of domestic and foreign policy – immigration, comprehensive schools, trade unions, Northern Ireland, Rhodesia – Heath had appeared almost deliberately to affront the party's traditional supporters while appeasing their tribal enemies. Strikes, crime, revolting students, pornography, terrorism, inflation eating away at their savings, even decimalisation, all stoked in saloon bars, golf clubs and the columns of the Daily Telegraph a rising anger that the country was going to the dogs while the Tory Government was not resisting but rather speeding the process. By the time Heath lost the February 1974 election an ugly mood had built up in the Tory party which lacked only heavyweight leadership to weld together the two elements – the political backlash and the economic analysis – to form a potent combination which ultimately became known as Thatcherism."

"The lengthy Watergate Scandal, which eventually led to the fall of Nixon in 1974, helped cause a crisis of confidence in American leadership. Moreover, Western disunity was seen in Western European unwillingness to respond in NATO to America’s global commitments as well as growing French alienation from the USA. Edward Heath, British Prime Minister from 1970 to 1974, was determined not to be branded as the American spokesman in Europe, was not eager for close co-operation with Nixon, and argued that membership in the European Community represented a welcome alternative to the USA. Britain was also faced from 1974 by a political upheaval stemming from a coalminers’ strike, and then by a more general crisis as high inflation and trade union power contributed to an acute sense of malaise and weakness. The idea of Britain playing a role in resisting Communist expansion and activity outside Western Europe and the North Atlantic appeared increasingly incredible. Nationalist violence in Northern Ireland placed a new strain on the British military."

"Mrs Thatcher made...the most rumbustious rampaging, right-wing speech that I've heard from the Government Front Bench in the whole of my life. Afterwards I saw Ted Heath and told him, "I've never heard a speech like that in all my years in Parliament." He said, "Neither have I." "I suppose this really was what Selsdon was all about." "Oh, there never was a Selsdon policy," Heath replied. "It was invented by Harold Wilson. Look at our 1970 manifesto; it wasn't there at all." ... I said I had some sympathy with Thatcher – with her dislike of the wishy-washy centre of British politics. He gave me such a frosty look that I daresay I had touched a raw nerve."

"He has a deep contempt for Britain, the British people and parliamentary democracy. He is trying to climb back to power via the Treaty of Rome, and put Britain under government from Brussels for ever. In 1970 Mr Heath solemnly promised that he would not take Britain into the Common Market without the full-hearted consent of the British people. He broke his pledged word then, and he now says he will not accept a 'No' vote on Thursday. Heath promised more jobs and higher living standards inside the EEC. These promises were all broken, and he now tells us we are so poor we cannot come out; beggars can't be choosers. That is false, too. Heath's leadership has been a total disaster for the British people. The Tory Party threw him out."

"It was abundantly apparent at the end of that meeting that the strike was political, because I remember McGahey, who'd been rather curt in his answers... I remember Ted [Heath] saying to him, "What is it you want, Mr McGahey?" He said something to the effect, "I want to see the end of your government!""

"The incredible sulk."

"Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less united, it was in many ways more independent. The leaders who ruled in the early stages of integration had all been formed in a world before the global hegemony of the United States, when the major European states were themselves imperial powers, whose foreign policies were self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters of the Second World War, but were not crushed by them. This was true not just of a figure like De Gaulle, but of Adenauer and Mollet, of Eden and Heath, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if their ambitions demanded it. Monnet, who did not accept their national assumptions, and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another fashion. Down into the 1970s, something of this spirit lived on even in Giscard and Schmidt, as Carter discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s, and the arrival in power in the 1990s of a postwar generation, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything except the Pax Americana. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone."

"You'll lose."

"A tragedy for the party. He's got no ideas, no experience and no hope."