Quotes from Stan Barstow

You can be in love with someone you hardly know, all romance and rapture and starry eyes.... But you can't love a person till you know him or her inside out, until you have lived with them and shared experience... you have got to share living before you can find love.

People's lives are often other than they seem to be on the surface. And sometimes, what's underneath and hidden is the best part of all, the part of real value.

The days draw out, the weather gets warmer, and it's what we call summer, with a bitter laugh when we've said it.

Bints are the very devil to understand.

I think it's a pity she doesn't read because it means we shan't ever be able to talk about the books we've both read and recommend them to one another.

I can't imagine myself at that age with all my troubles behind me and nothing left but pottering in the garden till the end.

a bloke can have six cars and holidays in the south of France every year and it's still what's inside him what counts.

I often wonder what it is makes bints pair off like this, one lovely and one horrible. You see it all the time and it must have turned more lads against one another than nearly anything else because if you're hunting in pairs somebody's got to have the horror.

Well, she can't have it both ways, can she? Just like a woman to want it, though.