Previous weeks' quotations

2018

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

Previous weeks' quotations 1999

Previous weeks' quotations 2000

Previous weeks' quotations 2001

Previous weeks' quotations 2002

Previous weeks' quotations 2003

Previous weeks' quotations 2004

Previous weeks' quotations 2005

Previous weeks' quotations 2006

Previous weeks' quotations 2007

Previous weeks' quotations 2008

Previous weeks' quotations 2009

Previous weeks' quotations 2010

Previous weeks' quotations 2011

Previous weeks' quotations 2012

Previous weeks' quotations 2013

Previous weeks' quotations 2014

Previous weeks' quotations 2015

Previous weeks' quotations 2016

Previous weeks' quotations 2017

Jan 2018

3^rd January

[W]hat I wanted was something engrossing, something reliable, and for me, that means something I have read before.

When I re-read, I know what I’m getting. It’s like revisiting an old friend. An unread book holds wonderful unknown promise, but also threatens disappointment. A re-read is a known quantity.

Jo Walton, 'Why I Re-read', 15 July 2008, in What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Fantasy and SF (2014)

10^th January

The woman who knows beyond a doubt that she is beautiful exists aplenty in male novelists' imaginations: I have yet to find her in women's books or women's memoirs or in life.

Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983)

17^th January

It is common to describe a dreadful restaurant meal as being like a car crash.... I have realised the comparison is entirely wrong - at least with a car crash the emergency services eventually come to deal with the pain and distress. With a terrible restaurant experience no one ever comes. You are left only with the bill and the aftertaste and an abiding sense that you did something really stupid by booking a table.

Jay Rayner, The 'Indian Jamie Oliver' leaves a shell-shocked Jay Rayner picking through the wreckage, The Guardian, 9 Aug 2009, reprinted in My Dining Hell: Twenty Ways To Have a Lousy Night Out

24^th January

All women should, therefore, be prepared for discovering faults in men, as they are for beholding spots in the sun, or clouds in the summer sky.

[Sarah Stickney Ellis], The wives of England : their relative duties, domestic influence, & social obligations (1843)

31^st January

The extraordinary, the thrilling, the transgressive provide automatic glamor, but it takes a brave author to try to describe lives that are so commonplace as not even to be extraordinarily unhappy. And happiness - not sexual satisfaction, not reward of ambition, not ecstasy, not bliss, just day-to-day happiness - has practically vanished from fiction. That may be because we distrust it, seeing it as sentimentality, confusing the real thing with the fake. Indeed, it’s not easy to write about. To ring true, description of even the humblest kind of fulfillment and contentment must be written in awareness of human inadequacy and cruelty and the always imminent possibility of illness, ruin, death.

Ursula K Le Guin, 'Kent Haruf: Our Souls At Night' (2016), in Words are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writer's Week (2016)

R.I.P. Ursula K Le Guin, 1929-2018.

Feb 2018

7^th February

[W]hen the chips are down, the spirit is exhausted and the body hungry, the same old thing is a great consolation.

Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen (1988)

14^th February

I am only certain that from first to last I have never had any ambition in the world beyond the deep instinct to attain self-expression, which instinct was accompanied by the conviction that thereby only could I fulfil the desire of my heart to help others. Fame, for one who is by temperament and taste a recluse, could be nothing but an embarrassing superfluity.

Havelock Ellis, My life (1940)

21^st February

I wasn’t really a baby. I was a bookworm. For the true bookworm, life doesn’t really begin until you get hold of your first book. Until then - well, you’re just waiting, really. You don’t even know for what, at that stage - if you did, you would be making more noise about it[.]

Lucy Mangan, My life as a bookworm: what children can teach us about how to read. Guardian Saturday Review, 17 Feb 2018

28^th February

It is a salutory thing to look back at some of the reforms which have long been an accepted part of our life, and to examine the opposition, usually bitter and often bizarre, sometimes dishonest but all too often honest, which had to be countered by the restless advocates of 'grandmotherly' legislation.

E. S. Turner, Roads to Ruin: The Shocking History of Social Reform (1950)

Mar 2018

7^th March

[T]his suggests to me that freedom of conscience is more profoundly inhibited by prejudice and taboo, internalized by us all, than it is by laws and institutions. We can see that it is easily manipulated by subrational means, suggestion, and repetition. And it can be inappropriately invested, making us confident when we would be better served by doubt.

Marilynne Robinson, 'What is Freedom of Conscience?' (5 May 2016), in What Are We Doing Here? Essays (2018)

14^th March

It’s called fat shaming with good reason. By the second episode I had decided to pre-empt the abuse, by misquoting Churchill on Twitter: yes, I was fatter than I might like. But I could lose weight. My tormentors would always be unpleasant ill-mannered scumbags.

It was a good line but I doubt it will ever stop them. Mention issues around weight management and there will always be someone wanting to point out the existence of food banks. Well done them. Personally, I think being sanctimonious is much worse than being obese. At least the overweight only have to deal with the impact themselves, whereas the judgmental impose their views on others.

Jay Rayner, 'Yes, I have to watch my weight. But don’t get me started on diets', Observer Food Monthly, Jan 2018

21^st March

[B]lockbusters such as Passengers and Jurassic World could have benefited from more female input, if only to point out that women don’t usually fall in love with creepy stalkers or go on safari in stiletto heels. It’s not that we need more kick-ass sci-fi heroines so much as a wider perspective on technological and ethical issues in the imagined future.

Anne Billson, 'The final frontier: how female directors broke into sci-fi ', The Guardian G2, 16 Mar 2018

28^th March

Literary history is, I think, familiar with the Catch-22 by which women who were virtuous could not know enough about life to write well, while those who knew enough about life to write well could not be virtuous.

Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983)

Apr 2018

4^th April

[S]he advances towards the row of gleaming white wash-basins, but is there defeated by the turning on of the water to wash her hands. It's a simple-looking stream-lined but incomprehensible mechanism she's never seen before: does one twist something, depress something, or wave one's hands at a certain distance beneath the orifice? There's nothing as obvious as a tap, and she is about to give up hope when another older woman arrives by her side to share, momentarily, her bewilderment, and then to solve the problem by a deft turn of a discreet lower spigot.

Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises (2016)

11^th April

I’m trying to get away from that old-fashioned female character as written by men for women, which is all about suffering, endurance and sacrifice. Why don’t we find some other talents and separate ourselves from the boredom of always having to be defined or pinned down in that way?

Deborah Levy, Books interview, The Observer New Review, 8 April 2018

18^th April

He loved her, certainly. But he loved her especially when she was as gay, as happy, as simple, as easy, as decorative as the flowers in his garden this morning through the open door.

Vita Sackville-West, Family History (1932)

[No quotation for 25th April]

May 2018

2^nd May

[S]he reviewed her situation and found it completely satisfactory. She was better able than most women to put aside the gift of beauty: she desired neither husband nor lover, nor to be admired, nor to make other women envious. All she wanted was to be - unencumbered.

Margery Sharp, Martha, Eric, and George (1964)

9^th May

The intensity of childhood reading, the instant and complete absorption in a book - a good book, a bad book, in any kind of book - is something I would give much to recapture.

Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading (2018)

16^th May

[W]e have known since God was a lad that a woman writing about relationships, parenthood and the domestic sphere was a lady novelist more likely to provide consolation than controversy, while her male counterpart was creating a searing portrait of the power dynamics of intimacy.

Alex Clark, Behind the literary lustre lie tales of power, secrecy and sexual abuse, The Guardian, 5 May 2018

[No quotations for 23rd and 30th May]

Jun 2018

[No quotations for 6th and 13th June]

20^th June

["]You filled up one column with indefensible acts, and then you filled up a slightly longer column with selfless ones. You spent every day of the latter portion of your earthly existence helping, guiding, and teaching others. It’s a simple concept, Chef Luck, of checks and balances. I could show you a graph if it would help."

"It’s just . . . it’s hard to believe

"Yes, I know. You no doubt had visions of sacrificing yourself to save another or the world or a busload of children. You all harbor those fantasies. There is no one big redemptive act, Chef Luck."

"There isn’t?"

"No. It’s never about giving your life. It’s about living your life. And you lived enough of yours well enough to make the difference. That’s all."

Matt Wallace, Taste of Wrath (2018)

27^th June

I have a reliable rule of thumb when it comes to art made for women and largely by women: if men sneer at it, the problem isn’t with the art but with the men. Nothing scares a certain type of man more than art that isn’t for him.

Hadley Freeman, Sex And The City made me who I am, and I make no apology for that Guardian Weekend, 23 June 2018

Ju1 2018

4^th July

You once said that books saved your life. How did they do that?
When I became ill, back living at my parents’ house, the only books I had were the children’s books on my bedroom shelf, and I found myself reading Winnie-the-Pooh over and over again, just for the comfort of knowing the story. There was something so therapeutic about it. I’d been quite snobby up to then about books, because I did a master’s in English literature and I was encouraged to believe it was all about style. We read all these postmodernist thinkers and plot was almost a dirty word. Then I found I wanted an actual story – I wanted beginning, middle, end – because that’s what was nourishing me and I lost that pretension almost overnight. I just wanted to go back to storytelling.

Lisa O' Kelly, Interview with Matt Haig ‘I kept thinking, can’t my own mental health advice help me?’ The Observer New Review, 1 July 2018

11^th July

Stratton-Porter had the crucial ability of the popular novelist to make the reader want to know what happens next to people in whose existence he does not for one minute believe.

Janet Malcolm, 'Capitalist Pastorale' (2009), in Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers (2013)

18^th July

We need to retrieve and depict the genealogy of actions, events or situations considered exceptional not in terms of personal heroics but inasmuch as they depart from existing norms and challenge the dominant consensus or common sense. Individual stories have to be placed within the trajectory of the events or situations they are caught up in without reducing their meaning to this generative context.

Phil Cohen, Archive That, Comrade!: Left Legacies and the Counter Culture of Remembrance (2018)

25^th July

A long intimacy was over. It had been composed of trust and suffering and love. It had no flaw in it, as Harriet's relationship with her mother had flaws. At the moment, with middle-age upon them, which they had awaited together, she felt she could dispense with this friendship less than anything else in her life. Now she would have no-one to run to with her few jokes, her many enthusiasms, her allusions, her memories.

Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek (1951)

Aug 2018

1^st August

I have lived so many lives through books, gone to so many places, so many eras, looked through so many different eyes, considered so many different points of view. The fact that I haven’t had time to do much myself seems but a small price to pay. I live my life quite as fully as I want, thank you. Books have not isolated me - they have connected me. What non-bookworms get by meeting actual people, we get from reading.

Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading (2018)

8^th August

I don’t have much faith in those who say, 'Here is a truly new book.' What is truly new in literature is only our uniquely individual way of using the storehouse of the world’s literature. We are immersed in what has preceded us.

Elena Ferrante, I don’t have much faith in those who say, ‘Here is a truly new book’. The Guardian Weekend, 21 July 2018

Sep 2018

Oct 2018

4^th October

Nov 2018

Dec 2018