Quotes from Brian Moore

There comes a point in many people's lives when they can no longer play the role they have chosen for themselves. When that happens, we are like actors finding that someone has changed the play.

When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you.

The silent majority distrusts people who believe in causes.

The world's made up of individuals who don't want to be heroes.

Love isn't an act, it's a whole life.

Love - why, I'll tell you what love is: it's you at 75 and her at 71, each of you listening for the other's step in the next room, each afraid that a sudden silence, a sudden cry, could mean a lifetime's talk is over.

Love isn't an act, it's a whole life. It's staying with [them] now because [they] need you; it's knowing you... will still care about each other when sex and daydreams, fights and futures—when all that's on the shelf and done with.

She watched the glass, a plain woman, changing all to the delightful illusion of beauty. There was still time: for her ugliness was destined to bloom late, hidden first by the unformed gawkiness of youth, budding to plainness in young womanhood and now flowering to slow maturity in her early forties, it still awaited the subtle garishness which only decay could bring to fruition: a garishness which, when arrived at, would preclude all efforts at the mirror game.

And maybe, although it was a thing you could hardly bear to think about, like death or your last judgment, maybe he would be the last one ever and he would walk away now and it would only be a question of waiting for it all to end and hoping for better things in the next world. But that was silly, it was never too late.

When a thing is told to you and you can't remember it happening it doesn't count somehow. It is as though it had nothing to do with you. Remembering, that's what counts.

O, she said, a woman in love can't afford to be proud. He must be made to see, he must be made to come back. And I must do it myself, no matter how silly it looks.

We had not written or phoned or called or even sent a lousy card. We were young: we had our troubles. If there is a hell it should be for selfishness.

And the bell jangled, the driver started. The bus whirled off, to the last stop, the lonely room, the lonely night.

He was a horrid-looking fellow. Fat as a pig he was, and his face was the colour of cottage cheese. His collar was unbuttoned and his silk tie was spotted with egg stain. His stomach stuck out like a sagging pillow and his little thin legs fell away under it to end in torn felt slippers. He was all bristly blond jowls, tiny puffy hands and long blond curly hair, like some monstrous baby swelled to man size.

What could he be thinking of? He seemed to be trying to remember something, perhaps an engagement, perhaps an excuse to leave her. For eventually, they all made some excuse.

They don't ask for favours, for daily bread, for forgiveness from of trespasses, deliverance from temptation and evil. All they ask is God's help to guide them in the right path. isn't that what all of us should ask?

What about those men you read about in newspaper stories who walk out of their homes saying they are going down to the corner to buy cigarettes and are never heard from again? This is Paris. I am here. What if I never go back?

How did I get so bogged down in ordinariness that even this once I couldn't do the spontaneous thing, the thing I really wanted to do. The future is forbidden to no one. Unless we forbid it ourselves.

She held him, her arms tight about him, she had never understood it, but when they met, she and her sister and brothers, suddenly all of their wives, husbands, and children seemed members of another race, no part of the Family, that family whose allegiances antedated all others.

The Protestants don't believe in Britain and the Catholics don't believe in God. And none of us believes in the future.

I am, always have been, a fool who rushes in, a blurter-out of awkward truths, a speaker-up at parties who, the morning after, filled with guilt, vows that never again, no matter what, but who, faced at the very next encounter with someone whose opinions strike me as unfair, rushes in again, blurting out, breaking all vows.

In the carnival hall of mirrors which is our memory, we distort what we see. In Ernie's mirror image of me, I am magnified, elongated into a girl who led him on, the object of his great, unhappy, unfulfilled love. While he, in the equal if opposite distortion of my mind's mirror, is reduced to a squat manikin from my past, a dull stranger, remembered only for his minor quirks.

the dead are now avenged. This case is closed.

If misery loves company, then triumph demands an audience.