Quotes from Graham Swift

Some things, some places perhaps take up their truer existence in the mind.

A feeble fire is worse than an empty grate.

And though, indeed, it only happened once, it's gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there's a memory for them to happen in …

It tasted as beer had always tasted the few times she'd drunk it, like brown autumn leaves.

There are those who fashion history and those who contemplate it; there are those who make things happen and those who ask why.

A complete fiction! Yet something that was clearly and completely fiction could also contain—this was the nub and the mystery of the matter—truth.

Can a mirror keep a print? Can you look into a mirror and see someone else? Can you step through a mirror and be someone else?

And, like a mother to herself, she would never forget that girl on a bicycle, though she would never mention her to anyone, never breathe a word.

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? Last Orders

When you work with water, you have to know and respect it. When you labor to subdue it, you have to understand that one day it may rise up and turn all your labors to nothing. For what is water, which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or colour of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing?

I taught you that by forever attempting to explain we may come, not to an Explanation, but to a knowledge of the limits of our power to explain.

How can there be any true revolution till we know what we're made of?

This world which we like to believe is sane and real is, in truth, absurd and fantastic.

Le parole erano come una pelle invisibile, che avvolgeva il mondo rendendolo reale.

L'insegnamento è l'antagonismo tra insegnante e studente. E' quello che viene prodotto dalla perseveranza dell'uno e la resistenza dell'altro. E' una lunga e dura lotta contro una resistenza naturale

To love is to be ready to lose, it's not to have, to keep.

per ogni protagonista comparso per una volta sul cosiddetto palcoscenico della storia, sono stati migliaia, milioni coloro che non sono mai entrati nel teatro, che non hanno mai saputo che lo spettacolo si stava svolgendo, che hanno continuato l'ingrato lavoro di far fronte alla realtà.

Così come noi siamo fatti per un decimo di tessuti viventi e per nove decimi di acqua, così la vita è per un decimo Qui e Ora, e per nove decimi è una lezione di storia. Per la maggior parte del tempo, il Qui e Ora non è nè qui nè ora.

La gente non legge forse i libri per fuggire da se stessa, e per tenere lontani i guai che ne scandiscono l'esistenza?

Could she have done what she'd done today if she'd had a mother to go to? Could she have had the life she didn't yet know she was going to have? Could her mother have known, making her dreadful choice, how she had blessed her?

For what is water, which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or colour of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing? And what are the Fens, which so imitate in their levelness the natural disposition of water, but a landscape which, of all landscapes, most approximates to Nothing?

She'd done her face, I guessed, in the hasty, automatic way of women who don't need to slap it on like warpaint.

history is that impossible thing: the attempt to give an account, with incomplete knowledge, of actions themselves undertaken with incomplete knowledge. So that it teaches us no shortcuts to Salvation, no recipe for a New World, only the dogged and patient art of making do.

If people read 'Tomorrow' and feel that it is offering them some view of my own household, they would be very, very wrong.