Quotes from Michael Frayn

A man sits in his car at the traffic lights, waiting for them to go green.

It's funny - there's nothing that stops you laughing like the sight of other people laughing about something else.

Everything is as it was, I discover when I reach my destination, and everything has changed.

You can create a good impression on yourself by being right, he realizes, but for creating a good impression on others there's nothing to beat being totally and catastrophically wrong.

Mathematics becomes very odd when you apply it to people. One plus one can add up to so many different sums

The almost egregiously English couple, Cedric and Rosamund Chailey, had slipped quietly away when the conversation turned to God. It had not seemed polite to be present when anything so American was being discussed.

Bohr: Heisenberg, I have to say - if people are to be measured strictly in terms of observable quantities... Heisenberg: Then we should need a strange new quantum ethics.

Some questions remain long after their owners have died. Lingering like ghosts. Looking for the answers they never found in life.

And now everything has changed once again. The air of the Close each evening is full of bird song - I've never really noticed it before. Full of birdsong and summer perfumes, full of strange glimpses and intimations just out of the corner of my eye, of longings and sadness and undefined hopes. It has a name, this sweet disturbance. Its name is Lamorna.

We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets, never to be reconciled, to our fellow-country men, to our neighbors, to our friends, to our family to our children. We have to go through not two slits at the same time but twenty-two. All we can do is to look afterwards, and see what happened.

Two thousand million people in the world, and the one who has to decide their fate is is the only one who's always hidden from me.

Yes, and you've never been able to understand the suggestiveness of paradox and contradiction. That's your problem. You live and breathe paradox and contradiction, but you can no more see the beauty of them than the fish can see the beauty of the water

Perhaps the home I am homesick for is still there, after all.

Margrethe: And when all our eyes are closed, when even the ghosts have gone, what will be left of our beloved world? Our ruined and dishonoured and beloved world?

deceivers must expect to be deceived.

Why did *I* lock the door? Why did YOU lock the door? Someone locked the door...

Bohr Before we can lay our hands on anything, our life's over. Heisenberg Before we can glimpse who or what we are, we're gone and laid to dust. Bohr Settled among all the dust we raised. Margrethe And sooner or later there will come a time when all our children are laid to dust, and all our children's children.

Look at your hand. Its structure does not match the structure of assertions, the structure of facts. Your hand is continuous. Assertions and facts are discontinuous.... You lift your index finger half an inch; it passes through a million facts. Look at the way your hand goes on and on, while the clock ticks, and the sun moves a little further across the sky.

The third week of June, and there it is again: the same almost embarrassing familiar breath of sweetness that comes every year about this time. I catch it on the warm evening air as I walk past the well-ordered gardens in my quiet street, and for a moment I am a child again and everything before me - all of the frightening, half-understood promises of life.

I should say that happiness is being where one is and not wanting to be anywhere else.

But that one single soul was emperor of the universe, no less than each of us.

Tessa liked her, in a dreary sort of way – the sort of way one liked picking one's nails or staying in bed all morning.

Early spring, yes. It's one of those cautiously hopeful days at the beginning of April, after the clocks have made their great leap forward but before the weather or the more suspicious trees have quite had the courage to follow them, and Kate and I are traveling north in a car crammed with food and books and old saucepans and spare pieces of furniture.

I can understand, he said, that many people, many perfectly ordinary people, have an interesting story to tell. No one's experience of life is valueless.