Quotes from Jenny Diski

For the most part, quantum theory has been of little practical value in my life.

Everything passes, but nothing entirely goes away.

It isn't important what you do, it is the attitude with which you proceed through the world that matters.

Everything passes, but nothing entirely goes away.

It isn't important what you do, it is the attitude with which you proceed through the world that matters.

But nothing will persuade me that the mere fact of being in a place is enough in itself to justify the effort of getting out of bed to become a tourist, or even a traveller. I don't have the slightest wish to be intrepid. I don't want to prove myself to myself or anyone else. I don't care if no one thinks me brave or hardy. I have no concern at all that I did not have whatever it is I should have had to take a dive out of a plane or off a building. None of that matters to me in the least.

But I do know a kind of madness that lies low in the mind, half-buried in consciousness, which lives in parallel to sanity, and given the right circumstances or even just half a chance, creeps like a lick of flame or a growing tumour up and around ordinary perception, consuming it for a while, and causing one, even when not at the movies, to quake in fear of the world and people and what they--I mean, of, we--are capable of.

We were greeted by the minister whose inclusive, non-judgemental smile was no more than a whisker away from a smirk. Have I made it clear? I don't like belief systems and even less like those that peddle self-righteousness. I have no doubt the minister was a sincere man, but I am not as impressed by the idea of sincerity as the sincere seem to be.

But given that depression happened to me, and I did have support, I found it was possible after a time, to achieve a kind of joy totally disconnected from the world. I wanted to be unavailable and in that place without the pain. I still want it. It is coloured white and filled with a singing silence. It is an endless ice-rink. It is Antarctica.

She wished Martin hadn't taken his Encyclopaedia Britannica with him when they split up. She missed that more than she missed him.

he was an ass. Her husband and Thomas' father was an ass: a fool who thought iut funny to frighten a small child, who could not resist the small, mean act of betrayal that proved him more powerful than his four-year-old son.

Disapproval always depends on other people - dead people, foreigners - doing the unacceptable action.

I have a special place devoted to worry that has an insatiable hunger to be filled. When it's empty, it worries anyway about what it's going to worry about. A sick kitten is ideal worry-material.

Jenny Diski lies here. But tells the truth over there",' I instructed. 'Also, I'd like a dove, a winged angel, an anchor and an open book, properly carved on a nice piece of granite.