Quotes from Tessa Hadley

Andy was receptive, like a deep vessel into which life was poured. If this terrible particular thing hadn't been poured into her, she would have been happier--it goes without saying--but less of a person. She was filled out by her fate. I actually think that this is quite rare, the capacity to become the whole shape of the accidents that happen to you.

Part of the oddity of marriage, she thought, was in how unwise it was to attend too intently to the other person. In order for love to survive, you had to close yourself off to a certain extent.

But what if the novels were right? What if sentimentality was closer to the truth of life and cynicism was the evasion

You just say the opposite to what everyone else thinks. Is that why people think you're so clever?

But she wasn't in love, though she had been ready to be. Love sank down gently from where it had been swollen in expectation -- she imagined a red balloon deflating to a foolish remnant. (In the cave, 171)

But now everything was lost: all the scattered effect of a real person, complicated beyond counting. (Post production, 197)

Ally wasn't disappointed in the writers: she hadn't expected anything from them in the first place; it hadn't occurred to her to be interested in writers as individuals beyond their work. To her relief no one whose books she'd read ever came to the centre, although sometimes she had to pretend to have read the writers who did. The writers could be fairly crazy, too; you had to be vigilant not to trip over their vanity or anxiety. Luckily, most of her favourites were dead. (She's the one, 151)

she scrubbed floors on her knees with a contemptuous hissing noise which must have come from her brush, though it seemed to come out of herself.

The present was always paramount, in a way that thrust you forward: empty, but also free. Whatever stories you told over to yourself and others, you were in truth exposed and naked in the present, a prow cleaving new waters; your past was insubstantial behind, it fell away, it grew into desuetude, its forms grew obsolete. The problem was, you were always still alive, until the end. You had to do something.

And that was true too, that was what the Culverts were like: crucified by their shyness and at the same time contemptuous of the world of ordinary people they couldn't talk to.

I hate to think of you stuck here all day every day, doing nothing with that brilliant brain of yours." "It never was brilliant. Anyway, who keeps these books to see who's used themselves wisely and who's wasted?

To have made up your mind from the beginning that everything people do is spoiled and bad and ugly. Really, I can't separate it from someone who believes in original sin. It's the new doctrine of original sin, environmentalism: the sins of the technological revolutions shall be visited upon the children until the nth generation. You believe the worst, so you never have to be disappointed. It's so cowardly, really.

What use was her grown-up knowledge--acquired through such initiations, at such risk--in this world of infants, who had to be kept safe?

I had worried sometimes about making the transition into being grown-up – how did you know when to begin? Now I understood that you stepped out into it, as simply as into a day

Goodness knows what hallucinations of danger and siege people are subject to, if they live anywhere too beautiful and too sequestered.

I'd lived all along as if I was acting out some turbulent drama; then I woke up one day and found I'd stopped believing in the play

It's painful and terrible that youth is over, and with it that whole game of looking and longing and vying for attention, hoping for something, for some absolute transformation of everything. But it's also a reprieve to be let off that hook and know that you're simply in your own hands at last

The past is closed up inside its own depressing little museum of faded styles and codes and anticipations; you can't re-enter it

This is what had always happened to women when they had too much time to think: they made themselves conduits to all the passions in the universe, they dreamed open all the possibilities that sane hard-working people kept shut away.

on an autumn day of showery fitful sunshine, fine rain floating in the gleams like dust motes, clouds liquid with light, thick cobwebs in the hedge glittering with raindrops.

Sometimes these days I almost think I can do without the present. The past is enough for me, it's enough for my life. Does that sound insane?

She knew from her own experience what a great labour it was, binding up again all the mess of self, which in your extremity you had unbound.

I'd rather be romantic than jaded. At least I've had a love life. Even if the romance does seem unreal sometimes, in retrospect. All that hard work of falling into love and falling out of it again. None of it leaves any trace, not visibly.

Perhaps these earthbound types were more susceptible to the freaks and fumes of delusion, having no resistance when once they stumbled in.