Quotes from Antonia Quirke

Watching movies simply is a promiscuous experience. The voracity it breeds! That quantity of quiddity compressed and quickened and sent at you! It's a little bit mad, isn't it, to hold a faithful flame for the one you've picked, when no such choice is required of you? The sane response to a rainbow is not to pick your favourite colour.

Madame Bovary, c'est moi. Emma Bovary. She was the first. The first to thrash around in the space between a packaged wonder and reality, trying to reconcile the two in her enormous, inarticulate heart. Madame Bovary, c'est toi, perhaps, dear reader. Madame Bovary, c'est tout le monde.

He tells you, more than anyone else, that a body is what a soul looks like, that the way you speak and move is all there is and nothing more need be said.

Even to know that delight, in a perfect world, would be the proper response to life is a simplicity beyond most of us.

My first plan was to impress him with the commitment of my reviews. I found out a lot of statistics and waved them at him like breasts at the pub on Thursday.

Life's a struggle against acting, which claims more lives than all the other drugs of the world put together.