Quotes from Gilbert Adair

All isms end in fascism.

The earth is mankind's ultimate haven, our blessed terra firma. When it trembles and gives way beneath our feet, it's as though one of God's checks has bounced.

Love is blind but not deaf.

We "need" cancer because, by the very fact of its incurability, it makes all other diseases, however virulent, not cancer.

My little Matthew, Isabelle at once snapped back at him, when two people agree, it means one of them is redundant

There is fire and fire: The fire that burns and the fire that gives warmth, a fire that sets a forest ablaze and the fire that puts a cat to sleep. So is it with self-love. The member that once seemed one of the wonders of the world soon becomes as homely as an old slipper. Mathew and himself gradually ceased to excite each other.

And my Black bird, still not quitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On that pallid bust -- still flitting through my dolorous domain; But it cannot stop from gazing for it truly finds amazing That, by artful paraphrasing, I such rhyming can sustain-- Notwithstanding my lost symbol I such rhyming still sustain-- Though I shan't try it again!

Love is blind but not deaf.

He was also terrified that he hadn't properly read the small print of their relationship. He forgot that true friendship is a contract in which there can be no small print.

Saying no, I thought, that has always been my forte, and no wonder, given that the stupidity of the world is rivalled only by its ugliness.

Could that be why brother and sister slept together in perfect impunity, a Romeo and Juliet starcrossed not because they belonged to two families but to a single one?

When you keep someone waiting you give him time to count up your faults.

Before you can change the world, you must understand that you yourself are part of it. You can not stand outside, looking in.

A lonely man thinks of nothing but friendship, just as a repressed man thinks of nothing but flesh.

The implication of her turn of phrase, as Matthew knew, wasn't to be taken seriously. But, like all sufferers from unrequited love, he had ceased to be particular. The words had been said. For that he was grateful. For his nocturnal reveries, for the postmortem of each day that he conducted night after night, it was all that mattered.

to preserve the memory of that very first morning as, in its pristine state, unwrinkled by projection, one preserves the negative of a film.

like a swan and its reflection on the surface of a lake.

So, amid all the laughter and the steam, the Trenet record, the unwound clocks, the veiled curtains, the teasing and banter, the dewy, mildewy glamour of a swimming-pool in whose stagnant atmosphere the flat was bathed, the days passed, jubilant and implacable, days divided by nights as two frames of film are divided by a black strip.

AMOUR AMER A MARRE A MORT

the English garden presented the reverse side of the tapestry, with rough, clotted textures, knots like fists and colours all running together.