Quotes from Michael Frayn

He felt lonely. His solitude was thrown into relief by being observed.

For the first time, Manning felt frightened. It was an indefinite fear, of being small and vulnerable among large forces that were indifferent to him.

Cambridge produces in abundance talents with the ability to please, but few with that greater ability to disregard whether they please or not.

You've got ten fingers,' said Morris. 'Why not stick them in ten pies?

Isn't it rather terrible that what brings the pricking behind my eyelids is not old Eddy's death, or even the thought of human mortality in general, but certain strokes of rhetoric – certain alliterations, repetitions, and verbal sonorities which don't hold any literal meaning for me? I'm more moved by literature than by what it describes!

Odd, though, all these dealings of mine with myself. First I've agreed a principle with myself, now I'm making out a case to myself, and debating my own feelings and intentions with myself. Who is this self, this phantom internal partner, with whom I'm entering into all these arrangements? (I ask myself.)

I feel bad that I don't feel worse.

You just have to work with what God sends, and if God doesn't seem to understand the concept of commercial success than that's your bad luck.

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

If you're doing something you have to concentrate on you can't also be thinking about doing it, and if you're thinking about doing it then you can't actually be doing it. Yes?" Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. "Copenhagen

No, she's in Spain, too, they're all in Spain, there's no one here... Am I in Spain? No, I'm not in Spain, dear, I'm in agony. That's where I am.

Better to stay on the boat, though, and fetch it about. Better to remain alive, and throw the lifebuoy. Surely!" Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. "Copenhagen

How difficult it is to see even what's in front of one's eyes. All we possess is the present, and the present endlessly dissolves into the past." Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. "Copenhagen

Shy and arrogant and anxious to be loved. Homesick and pleased to be away from home at last." Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. "Copenhagen".

That was the last and greatest demand that Heisenberg made on his friendship with you. To be understood when he couldn't understand himself. And that was the last and greatest act of friendship for Heisenberg that you performed in return. To leave him misunderstood." Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. "Copenhagen

And when all our eyes are closed, when even the ghosts have gone, what will be left of our beloved world?" Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. "Copenhagen

Physics, yes? Physics. This is physics. It's also politics. The two are sometimes painfully difficult to keep apart. Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. "Copenhagen".

Bohr: You never cared what got destroyed on the way, though. As long as the mathematics worked out you were satisfied. Heisenberg: If something works it works. Bohr: But the question is always, What does the mathematics mean, in plain language? What are the philosophical implications?" Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. "Copenhagen

Decisions make themselves when you're coming downhill at seventy kilometres an hour. Suddenly there's the edge of nothingness in front of you. Swerve left? Swerve right? Or think about it and die? In your head you swerve both ways …" Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. "Copenhagen

We know nothing worth knowing about what goes on outside our frontiers. Worse-we know very little more about what goes on within them. Beyond the light of one's own personal experience-darkness. What are people thinking? What are they feeling? How do they behave? Messages of reassurance or exhortation come through. One reads between the lines. Friends pool their knowledge. But in general we live like animals, in ignorance of the world around us.

Not your view, I know—you'd be happy to describe what you were up to purely in differential equations if you could—" Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. "Copenhagen".

Margrethe slips into history even as I turn back to Bohr. And yet how much more difficult still it is to catch the slightest glimpse of what's behind one's eyes. Here I am at the centre of the universe, and yet all I can see are two smiles that don't belong to me.

I can't help feeling sceptical about the Bible's claim that God made man in his own image...He could have achieved that by creating a couple of mirrors; or a closed-circuit television.

I shatter the objective universe around you—and all you can say is that there's an error in the formulation!" Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. "Copenhagen".