Previous weeks' quotations

2025

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Jan 2025

1^st January

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Thomas Hardy, The Darkling Thrush (1900)

8^th January

You were the kind that is so scared of life that you only know how to despise it, for fear you might be tricked into liking something that wasn't up to the standards of a handful of people you admired

Robertson Davies, World of Wonders (1975)

15^th January

I’m happier with writers who, perhaps suffering less from the famous “anxiety of influence,” have enough sense of their own worth to appreciate their predecessors and fellow-workers in the saltmines of literature. The whole history of a literature and of every genre within it is a chain of influences, inventions shared, discoveries made common, techniques adopted and adapted. Must I say again that this has absolutely nothing to do with copying texts, with stealing stuff?

Ursula K Le Guin, Art, Information, Theft, and Confusion, Part Two, 1 August 2010

22^nd January

But robo art did not take off. Art has always thrived on biography – it exists in every piece like a watermark.... There was no madness in the robo artists, no sawn-off ears or suicide, no history.

Sam Mills, The Watermark (2024)

29^th January

This experience made me say to myself, "If a Roman woman had, some years before the sack of Rome, realised why it was going to be sacked and what motives inspired the barbarians and what the Romans, and had written down all she knew and felt about it, the record would have been of value to historians. My situation, though probably not so fatal, is as interesting." Without doubt it was my duty to keep a record of it.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942)

Feb 2025

5^th February

People were still not pretending that they wanted to dash out and die for their country, which as late as that seemed a useless thing to do, God forgive us; but there was a great deal of altruism left, notwithstanding the sneers of the perpetual critics to whom mankind is such a poor thing you wonder they can bear themselves.

Margery Allingham, The Oaken Heart (1941)

12^th February

The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define..... The intensely, stiflingly human quality of the novel is not to be avoided; the novel is sogged with humanity; there is no escaping the uplift or the downpour, nor can they be kept out of criticism. We may hate humanity, but if it is exorcised or even purified the novel wilts, little is left but a bunch of words.

E M Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927)

19^th February

People who find their lives getting complicated tend to do things which will complicate them still further, under the impression that they're doing the exact opposite.

Desmond Cory, Stranglehold (1961)

26^th February

[I]f success is the goal, it seems clear to me that the fast track is headed the wrong way. Think of the people who are genuinely successful--pathbreaking scientists, best-selling novelists.... They are not, on the whole, the kind of people who keep glancing shiftily at their watches or making small lists titled "To Do"." On the contrary, many of these people appear to be in a daze.... These truly successful people are childlike, easily distractable, fey sorts[.]

Barbara Ehrenreich, 'The Cult of Busyness' (1985), in Had I Known: Collected Essays (2020)

Mar 2025

5^th March

[O]nly those who have never tried it for a week or two can suppose that the pursuit of knowledge does not demand a strength and determination, a resolve not to be beaten, that is a special kind of energy[.]

Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels (1982)

12^th March

Fran is so deeply incapable of seeing herself in a powerful position that, when she is involved in a tricky situation such as this, she is not good at discerning obsequious mannerisms or the gradations of subservience. She is always ready to put herself in the wrong, and in this instance has succeeded very thoroughly in so doing.

Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises (2016)

19^th March

[E]verybody feels like an outsider. Even the most elegant of us, the most poised – everybody, some of the time anyway, feels as if they’re being looked at and poorly judged, and speaking weird and dressing wrong.

Eva Wiseman, Art, Leigh Bowery and the weaponisation of embarrassment. The Observer, 9 March 2025

26^th March

I'm aware that all such forms of consensus about "great" books and "perennial" problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of "what is already known."

Susan Sontag, 'The Salmagundi interview', 1975, in On Women (2023)

Apr 2025

2^nd April

Talent is rare and genius rarer still, but the chances are that it is still as evenly distributed as anything else across a given population. It is the opportunities to exercise it that are not.

Lucy Mangan, Bookish: How Books Shape Our Lives (2025)

9^th April

I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some 'ordinary' world into which it is possible at will to wander.

Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World (1955)

16^th April

Here in his hands the power—here in his head and heart the desire, and between a barrier that he could not surmount. He could not wish to paint "beautiful" pictures because he meant his own "beautiful" when he said the word, and he had not yet made it. Plainly he could not wish for that which had not yet become. His "beautiful" was growing inside of him. When achieved it would be the sum of what he had thought and felt and could think and feel.

Norman H Matson, Flecker's Magic (1926)

23^rd April

She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. The passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose. Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug.

Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost (1951)

30^th April

I stop again, and shake my head to try to throw out the painful thoughts.
‘I suppose I must carry on her work.’
‘What work was that, darling?’
‘The work of making the world more delightful and reassuring so that people would want to live in it.’

Rosemary Tonks, Businessmen as Lovers (1969)

May 2025

7^th May

Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.

Susan Sontag, 'The Salmagundi Interview' (1975), in On Women (2023)

14^th May

[A] pile of old books is as rich a seam of possibilities as any neat row of shiny contemporary tomes, and oftentimes more so.

Lucy Mangan, Bookish: How Books Shape Our Lives (2025)

21^st May

For most of us, at least for some if not all of the time, there will be some fear, niggling or much bigger, that everyone else fits in but you have some stain on your pedigree that somehow means you are only on the outside looking in, different from everyone else.

Athene Donald, Athene Donald's Blog : Choosing Your Image, 12 May 2025

28^th May

He knew a great many people in Essex, but one guessed that he had insisted on knowing them rather than that they had sought to know him.

Long Live Great Bardfield: the Autobiography of Tirzah Garwood (2016)

Jun 2025

4^th June

[S]implicity consists in getting bothersome irrelevancies out of the way, and that therefore the best place to be simple is at the top of a pyramid of other people's exertions. The simplest way to get fed is not to start by grinding your own corn; it is to be in a hotel room and pick up a telephone and order a meal cooked by someone else to be sent up.

Katharine Whitehorn, 'The Simple Life', Only On Sundays (1966)

11^th June

In five experiments on how reading fiction impacts on measures of wellbeing, Carney and Robertson found no measurable effects from simply being exposed to fiction: the mechanism, they note, is not akin to a pharmaceutical that can prescribed.

Reading as therapy: medicalising books in an era of mental health austerity, Health Sociology Review 2025

18^th June

Historians come and go, but the document remains, and it has the importance of a thing that cannot be changed or gainsaid. Whoever wrote it continues to speak through it. It might be honest and it might be complete; on the other hand it could be thoroughly crooked or omit something of importance. But there it was, and it was all succeeding ages possessed.

Robertson Davies, World of Wonders (1975)

25^th June

I don't know if I wholly trust once-and-done readers. I suspect that when they grow up, they are the people who view books as another plate in their social armour and arrange their reading around lists[.]

Lucy Mangan, Bookish: How Books Shape Our Lives (2025)

Ju1 2025

2^nd July

They were both fairly intelligent; both (if their general conversation were any guide) frequenters of women; he himself was fairly intelligent, and a married man; and there they all three sat, discussing women as though women were some unknown fauna of the Antipodes.

Margery Sharp, Britannia Mews (1946)

9^th July

I began to see how people could need drink to cover up embarrassments, and I remembered many sticky church functions which might have been improved if somebody had happened to open a bottle of wine. But people like us had to rely on the tea-urn and I felt that some credit was due to us for doing as well as we did on that harmless stimulant.

Barbara Pym, Excellent Women (1952)

16^th July

She was married for 20 years and raised two children, writing as much as possible. When pressed for her strategy there she replies, “I had no social life and my house was a mess.”

Paula Bomer, ‘If you describe yourself as a victim, you’re dismissed’, The Guardian, 6 July 2025

23^rd July

What's the use of being brilliant... if you sit at a cafe all day and are considered the greatest bore because you don't know when to stop talking and never write anything down?

Sybille Bedford on Esther Murphy, quoted in Lisa Cohen, All We Know: Three Lives (2012)
cited in Selina Hastings, Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life (2020)

30^th July

That was a good straightforward point of view, no pretence that games were anything but an outlet for power and aggression; no stuff about their being enjoyable as such. You played a game to demonstrate that you did it better than someone else. If it came to that, I thought, how few people do anything for its own sake, from making love to practising the arts.

Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones (A Dance to the Music of Time, #7) (1964)

Aug 2025

6^th August

You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake your machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.

Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost (The Salterton Trilogy #1) (1951)

13^th August

Whether or not epicurean journeys are delicious is a moot point, however, because we are here to gasp spellbound at the chef’s imagination and to nod sagely as a surprise amuse-bouche of fresh peas and lovage is delivered in a teeny ramekin with an equally ickle spoon.

Grace Dent, The Greyhound, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire: ‘An oligarch’s saloon bar teetering on the edge of chintz’ – restaurant review, Guardian Food 3 Aug 2025

20^th August

[T]his condemnation is a vehicle for a sort of political disappointment that feminists are fond of cultivating with respect to preceding generations of feminists.

Andrea Long Chu, 'On Liking Women' (2018), in Authority: Essays on Being Right (2024)

27^th August

“I’ve seen this story multiple times, not just in science, where we suddenly pull in a female lead, give them an extremely difficult job and then they become the scapegoat.”

Tom Whipple, Alan Turing Institute accused of ‘toxic’ culture, The Times, 17 Aug 2025

Sep 2025

3^rd September

Both she and Umfraville might be said to represent forms of revolt, and nothing dates people more than the standards from which they have chosen to react.

Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones (A Dance to the Music of Time, #7) (1964)

10^th September

I suppose that knowing when to stop is just as important as knowing when to push through.

Sally Mann, My quest to take the perfect photograph. The Observer, 31 Aug 2025

17^th September

[I]t is the moment of reversal, when ill fortunes change to good, that is the essential of escape fiction; and a good half of the plot mechanics of this sort of thing consist simply in setting up a situation, that shall not be too obviously preposterous[.]

Katherine Whitehorn, 'Just You Wait, 'Enery 'Iggins' (1960), in Only On Sundays (1966)

24^th September

There is here, as in the matter of reading, simply an enormous difference in individual physical and psychological ways of performing an act which has no bearing on the value of the result.

Rebecca West, 'The Craft of the Reviewer' [date unknown], in The Essential Rebecca West: Uncollected Prose (2010)

Oct 2025

1^st October

The story is the important thing. But we are now back to front, because what people have found in previous stories are being used to govern what should be in future ones. And this is ridiculous.

Diana Wynne Jones, 'A Talk About Rules' (1995), in Reflections: On the Magic of Writing (2012)

Nov 2025

Dec 2025