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2024
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3rd January
Sir Winston had to divest himself of his rain gear, which included galoshes, a source of fascination to Griselda, for whom they had only ever been a rumour in children’s books. Straps and buckles... Not for the first time, she wondered about the fetishism of the upper classes; about their clinging on to the ways of childhood - the nannies and the school dinner menus; the club ties - and about the wisdom of putting those mired in their own pasts in charge of all our futures.
Mick Herron, The Secret Hours (2023)
10th January
The problem of "outsider" artists is the whole problem of what to do with unlabeled, disallowed, disavowed, not-even-consciously-perceived experience which cannot be spoken about because it has no embodiment in existing art. Is one to create new forms wholesale--which is practically impossible? Or turn to old ones.... Or "trivial," trashy genres, like Austen's ladies' fiction?
Joanna Russ, 'What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can't Write' (1972) in To Write Like A Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction (1995)
17th January
[O]nly the slow perspective, the long view, lets you see the power that lies in ordinary people, in movements, in campaigns that often are seen as unrealistic, extreme, aiming for the impossible at their inception.
Rebecca Solnit, 'Slow Change Can Be Radical Change' (2024)
24th January
You know, the secret connections behind everything always come down to people you never hear about, who put things together so other stuff can happen. It’s something I’ve seen over and over again, yet historians always neglect to mention it!
Greg Shaw, cited in 'The Music Mogul' in Rob Hansen (ed.) Beyond Fandom: Fans, Culture & Politics in the 20th Century (2023)
31st January
[P]eople who see themselves as recorders and observers are always surprised to be seen as doers and movers.
Doris Lessing, African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (1992)
7th February
[T]here are more women whom men find attractive than men whom women find attractive[.]
Rebecca West, 1900 (1982)
14th February
His book [Thomas Smith, Syntagma de druidum moribus, 1664] provides a classic illustration of how a completely erroneous theory, based ultimately on mere wish-fulfilment, can be argued with admirable learning and logic.
Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (2009)
21st February
Confound you handsome young fellows! you think of having it all your own way in the world. You don’t understand women. They don’t admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)
28th February
"I don't think you know what you want."
He replied at dictation speed with a great deal of care, in fact far too much,
"I want you."
The curious fact was that he meant it, but someone coming into the cinema at that moment could be well and truly forgiven for thinking the reverse. I nearly said: "Oh please, do that bit again, a little better."
Rosemary Tonks, The Halt during the Chase (1972)
6th March
We writers all stand on each other's shoulders, we all use each other's ideas and skills and plots and secrets. Literature is a communal enterprise.... Understand me: I don't mean plagiarism: I'm not talking about imitation, or copyring, or theft.... What I mean is that stuff from other people's books gets into us just as our own experiences does, and, like our own experience, gets composted and transmuted and transformed by the imagination, and comes forth entirely changed, our own, growing out of our own mind's earth.
Ursula K Le Guin, 'The Question I Get Asked Most Often' (2000), in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination (2004)
13th March
A man was pressing me to do something I did not want to do, and pressing me in a manner he would never have applied to another man: by telling me that I didn't know what I wanted. I felt my eyes narrowing and my heart going cold. For the first--but not the last--time, I consciously felt men to be a species separate from myself. Separate and foreign. It was as though an invisible membrane had fallen between me and my lover, one fine enough to be penetrated by desire but opaque enough to obscure human fellowship.
Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir (2015)
20th March
[A] first rate potboiler is likely to be better written, to be far more worth the money and attention of the reader, than a tenth rate work of art.
Margaret Kennedy, Outlaws on Parnassus (1958)
27th March
He is altogether selfish, she thought in some surprise, the only man I have ever sat and talked to alone, and I am impatient; he is simply not very interesting.
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
3rd April
'If there is one thing people cannot stand,' the old man had said, 'it is that someone should achieve happiness and distinction by doing work which they despise.[']
Simon Raven, Fielding Gray (1967)
10th April
The poet, the poet's work, the poet's admirers, the poet's children, the poet's clothes. all the constituents of the poet's day were the business of four women. Wordsworth's achievement in making wives of four unusual and gifted women remains quite a remarkable one.
Norma Clarke, Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship, Love : The Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans, and Jane Welsh Carlyle (1990)
17th April
I like having the piano in the kitchen because it takes up a lot of space in my shed, and also because I can serenade my wife during cocktail hour. I think she would enjoy this more if I could play the piano.
Tim Dowling, I’m taking requests on the piano. The only one I get is ‘Stop’. The Guardian, 6 April 2024
The half-truth business wasn’t very important; it seemed to come along sooner or later with every marriage.
Desmond Cory, On the Gulf (2012)
1st May
[W]hile the cult of novelty may be silly, new things often aren’t. Fresh peas really were a brilliant innovation. The first pineapples must have been a revelation.
Jay Rayner, 'Food crazes make me want to roll my eyes. But first, pass me a crookie' Observer Food Monthly, 18 April 2024
8th May
If you're fabulous, you have impeccable good taste and impeccable bad taste, too.... There are dozens of rules. If you're fabulous, you know them instinctively. If you're not, you don't.
It's simple
Lee Tulloch, Fabulous Nobodies (1989)
15th May
If Caroline asks nebulous acquaintances in and they laugh and enjoy themselves, he says: ‘I feel like a visitor in my own house.’ If she doesn’t ask anyone, he says: ‘We never see anybody.’ If he asks someone he says: ‘I’m ashamed to ask people, the way we live. There was a hole in the corner of the tablecloth.’ ‘Nonsense,’ says Caroline, ‘that’s lace. It’s got to start somewhere.’
Rosemary Tonks, Businessmen as Lovers (1969)
22nd May
Marty was one of those guys who knew so much about a thing that he had to tell you far more about it than you ever wanted to know.
Robert B Parker, Bad Business (2004)
29th May
It was so abundantly clear that Miss Flaxman did not want Harriet, that Mr. Farringdon did not want Mr. Pomfret, and that Mr. Pomfret did not want to go, that she felt the novelist's malicious enjoyment in a foolish situation. Since none of the party could now very well get out of the situation without open rudeness, the invitation was eventually accepted.
Dorothy L Sayers, Gaudy Night (1935)
5th June
[S]he had by her prime received so much trivial sexual admiration that she had come to find it genuinely boring, thus offering a sincere rather than an assumed resistance.
Margaret Drabble, The Ice Age (1977)
12th June
We have all known, or at least read of, those who achieved the difficult task of loving the sinner while hating the sin, but it is even more unusual, and perhaps saintlier, to hate boredom but tolerate bores
Winifred Peck, A Little Learning: or, A Victorian Childhood (1952)
19th June
Of course there was a certain pleasure in not doing something; it was impossible that one’s high expectations should be disappointed by the reality.
Barbara Pym Some Tame Gazelle (1950)
26th June
The position of women, their subjection or freedom, has a strong bearing on the value of this plot. The prettier she sits, the harder it is for the author to persuade the reader that it was worth her while to go through so much to get so little. He must be presented as a very fine fellow indeed, and fine fellows are not easily come by, as every novelist knows.Margaret Kennedy, Outlaws on Parnassus (1958)
3rd July
It’s not going to set the world on fire but it is going to make it a nicer place to be for the duration. Sometimes, that is more than enough.
Lucy Mangan, Land of Women review, Guardian G2, 26 June 2024
10th July
The telegraph and society papers and interviewing and America and yellow journalism … and all those family memoirs and diaries and autobiographies and Court scandals…. They produce a new kind of public, a public which craves for personalities rather than information. They want to learn about our clothes and incomes and habits. Not a questioning public, I mean; a prying public—""A cannibalistic public," said the Count, quietly. "Men cannot live, it seems, save by feeding on their neighbour's life-blood. They prey on each other's nerve-tissues and personal sensations. Everything must be shared.
Norman Douglas, South Wind (1917)
17th July
‘Like painting the Forth Bridge,’ described a never-ending Sisyphean task. Except that, these days, the idiom was a dead letter. Now the industrial chemists had come up with a paint whose topcoat would last for twenty years. It had made Karen wonder which of the other apparent certainties she carried in her head were equally invalid.Val McDermid, Out of Bounds (2016)
24th July
When the air clears and the orders stop raining down on my head, I can see quite clearly for myself that the reason he’s so bad-tempered is that fundamentally he’s an extremely lazy man; he never does anything for himself, but only tells you how to do it, and is rude to you into the bargain. He calls this ‘a genius for organisation’. But putting your finger on other people’s weaknesses isn’t so difficult[.]Rosemary Tonks, The Way Out of Berkeley Square (1971)
31st July
Later, when Mira was even a little bit older, she would have been too shy to meet someone who she thought would change her life. She would have been worried about how she’d appear, or would fear that she’d embarrass herself in some way. But she didn’t think of herself as a person back then. She didn’t think of herself as someone who another person could see, evaluate, and finally judge.Sheila Heti, Pure Colour (2022)
7th August
[W]e leave these myriad minor enjoyments to look after themselves. This is a serious blemish. It means that people do not try to relish their lives. Almost everything satisfactory should be tasted critically, like port. Not necessarily with a too conscious control, but more consciously than at present. And we should do our best to deduce from the taste the ingredients which are wanting, in order to supply them: to interest ourselves in, and make a hobby of, improving every one of our pleasant experiences.TH White, They Winter Abroad (1932)
14th August
In the same way that culture scorns single women who keep cats and enjoy their own company, or that new mothers get so much opprobrium for walking around, plainly in love with their baby and not caring about their own appearance, society demands women to be always looking outwards, always waiting.Zoe Williams, My weeks of reading hornily: steamy book sales have doubled – and I soon found out why, The Guardian 6 August 2024
21st August
A noir that does in fact have a conventionally structured plot can offer just as much commentary on the human condition, while also providing the pleasures of an ingenious thriller.
Peter Bradshaw, Only the River Flows review , The Guardian 13 August 2024
28th August
Hemingway, in his typical grandiose way, said that courage was grace under pressure. It occurred to her that, contrary to Hemingway, unless you’re going to be a bullfighter, you don’t need grace under pressure. You need grace in between pressures—getting from pressure to pressure—not when your house falls down on you.Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time (1979)
4th September
‘Men do not know what they want, so they can never be happy. Whereas women know exactly what they want, and when they get it they are happy. So, you see, happiness starts with the women. You can never please a man by doing what he wants, never, because he always wants something else immediately after. But if you do what you want, and get happiness out of it, then the man catches the happiness from you! It’s simple!’Rosemary Tonks, Businessmen as Lovers (1969)
11th September
[O]ne must own that there are certain books which can be read without the mind and without the heart, but still with considerable enjoyment.
Virginia Woolf, 'Miss Mitford', The Common Reader (1925)
18th September
He had a breakdown a few years ago, which led to a series of ‘revelations’. When women have breakdowns, they take pills and suffer in quiet desperation; when men have breakdowns, they elevate their angst into philosophy, acquire followers, build a cult.
Sam Mills, The Watermark (2024)
25th September
Tom decided that he had had enough and that he would devote himself to a study of boredom. He would seek it out in station waiting rooms, empty churches and industrial estates. He would buy a can of paint, slosh some of it on one of his walls and watch it dry. He would set up unvarying routines. He would try to always think about those routines in the same way and would be careful to note when he achieved this that he ‘always thought like that’. But yet he feared that at the end of it he would discover what he already knew — that, as someone once remarked, boredom was precisely ‘the desire to feel desires’.Robert Irwin, Tom's Version (2023)
2nd October
[T]hat we have complicated life too much by mixing up adventurous love and sex--by thinking that sex must enter into every close relationship, though far more adventurous and lovely than those which we dare permit ourselves today are indiscrimate loves towards both men and women.Winifred Holtby to Vera Brittain, 21 August 1928, in Selected Letters of Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain (1920-1935) (1960)
9th October
He was not a small-town person. He didn't find such towns friendly, and he didn't find them comforting. In his experience, the smaller the town, the more likely it was to be a hotbed of intrigue and resentment.
Jane Haddam, Living Witness (2009)
16th October
You never know, until you look back, how connected your own moves are to major cultural tides.
Jill Schary Robinson, 'Cosmo: Introduction: Age Cannot Wither', in Go Find Out: Collected Writings 1951-2020 (2021)
23rd October
I entered upon a life unimagined previously, of happiness impossible to youth or to the years of being constantly needed both at home and at work.
Carolyn G Heilbrun, The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty (1997)
30th October
[H]e was feeding his investigatory reflex like a king, filling it full of the good factual cheer that it wanted. One is accustomed to see this antithesis between those who deny their instincts and those who satisfy them represented in reference to another and more obvious instinct.... But it appears that other instincts know how to clap and cheer when fed, to mope when starved.Rebecca West, The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews (1928)
6th November
It was delightful to have a house of one’s own, to order the sort of meals that agreed with one, to go to bed when one felt sleepy, in short, to have no one to consider but oneself.
O Douglas, The Day of Small Things (1930)
13th November
But nobody, except the most criminally irresponsible or pitifully incompetent, escapes to jail. The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is “escapism” an accusation of?
Ursula K Le Guin, It Doesn’t Have To Be the Way It Is, June 2011
Because how do we define best?....The best restaurant depends on your mood and the company you’re in.... It depends on a lot of things. On the right day the best restaurant in the world for you could be a caff serving hot apple crumble and custard.
Jay Rayner, What’s the silliest question you can ask a restaurant critic? (And yes, I have the answer), The Guardian, 14 November 2024
27th November
Queer, how all these years she and Gareth had dragged on in that hateful—that indecent intimacy of every inch of space shared, because neither had dared shatter aloud the forced assumption that these conditions were as both wished them.
G B Stern, A Marrying Man (2018)
4th December
A long time ago it occurred to me that when people are tired and hungry, which in adult life is much of the time, they do not want to be confronted by an intellectually challenging meal: they want to be consoled. When life is hard and the day has been long, the ideal dinner is... something that makes one feel, if only for a minute, that one is safe.Laurie Colwin, 'Nursery Food', Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen (1988)
11th December
I was not sure I wanted to issue orders to life; I rather liked the Greek notion of allowing Chance to take a formative hand in my affairs.
Robertson Davies, Fifth Business (1970)
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