Quotes from Graham Swift

And what if orphans really were called orchids? And if the sky was called the ground. And if a tree was called a daffodil. Would it make any difference to the actual nature of things? Or their mystery?

I taught you that there is never any end to that question, because, as I once defined it for you (yes, I confess a weakness for improvised definitions), history is that impossible thing: the attempt to give an account with incomplete knowledge, of actions themselves undertaken with incomplete knowledge.

Ah, children, pity level-crossing keepers, pity lock-keepers – pity lighthouse-keepers – pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers), caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon…

It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive. It was about finding a language. And it was about being true to the fact, the one thing only followed from the other, that many things in life—oh so many more than we think—can never be explained at all.

Not all of it was done by soldiers, or by men. She'd shut her eyes and run her fingers over Jack's shoulders, down his spine, as a blind person might seek to recognise the shape of something. The shape—the ache in her own flesh—of her love for him.

It makes you feel sort of cheap and titchy. Like it's looking down at you, saying, I'm Canterbury Cathedral, who the hell are you?

A friend of his entered the restaurant, looking too, for whatever reason, a little frail. The was an exchange of token 'how are you's and 'oh, all right's. Then Alan said, with a rush of cheeriness, 'Hard work, isn't it - being all right?

When it comes down to it, Matthew was just another disillusioned idealist, an over-reactive Hamlet type--couldn't take it that the world was real.

Words were like an invisible skin, enwrapping the world and giving it reality. Yet you could not say the world would not be there, would not be real if you took away the words. At best it seemed that things might bless the words that distinguished them, and that words might bless everything.

And she supposed—the furrowed face would bloom again—that it was a very common human predicament. To be at a loss, not to know what to do with yourself.

When something's one thing, it's not another.

Could life be so cruel yet so bounteous at the same time?

Reality's not strange, not unexpected.Reality doesn't reside in the hallucination of events. Reality is uneventfulness, vacancy, flatness. Reality is that nothing happens.

His mother is dead, yet she has never not been, in theory, at his shoulder. He wants her not to have known and suffered or even witnessed all the things that followed her death. Including all this now. But that would be like wishing her dead. Merely dead.

It was like a voyage, only the other way round. So that instead of the waiting and hoping to sight land, you were moving over land in the first place, all impatient, all ready for that first glimpse. The seaside. The sea.

Those TV pictures had looked like scenes from hell. Flames leaping up into the night. Even so, cattle aren't people. Just a few months later Jack had turned on the telly once again and called to Ellie to come and look, as people must have been calling out, all over the world, to whoever was in the next room, 'Drop what you're doing and come and look at this.

But this would have been to ignore the young man of only twenty-five, who, for all his, by now, increasing and debilitating proneness to thought, still possessed, in spite of himself, a healthy animal nature. He falls in love, heavily, thickly, thankfully (is there any other way?). He is still--thank God--open to experience. He sees himself, indeed, as saved--returned to the sweet, palpable goodness of the world.

And so long as we have this itch for explanations, must we not always carry round with us this cumbersome but precious bag of clues called History? Another definition: Man, the animal which demands an explanation, the animal which asks Why.

Jei gyvenimas jums k? nors si?lo, k? darote? Atmetate? Užsimerkiate, nusisukate? Apsimetate, kad ??jote ne pro tas duris. Tai skirta ne man, kažkam kitam...

was what, she sometimes thought, libraries were for: for men to disappear into and be important in, even though they had disappeared.

Kaip gali b?ti kažkuo, pirma nepabuv?s niekuo?

How little you know how you've kept my balance.

If the word love is never spoken, does it mean there isn't any love?

And I remember some passage being read out somewhere, that there's no sinner so bad, so worthless, that God will ever let them slip through the net of his love... And whether he's up there or not, and whether he's got a net I don't know. But I think it's how it ought to be just between us. There ought to be at least one other person who won't let us slip through their net. No matter what we do, no matter what we've done. It's not a question of right or wrong. It's not a question of justice.