Home > Author > Beryl Bainbridge
1 " Man himself is so buffeted by shifts of thought and mood, not knowing from one day to the next what he truly feels, that a shifting earth is well-nigh the last straw. "
― Beryl Bainbridge , Master Georgie
2 " I've never been drawn to the feminist movement. I've never been put down by a man, unless I deserved it, and have never felt inferior. "
― Beryl Bainbridge
3 " It wasn't all misery. On one of our halts we lay spreadeagled on the ice and stared up at a sky blazing with the glory of the most wonderful aurora I'd ever witnessed. I groaned beneath the splendour of those silken curtains, yellow, green, and orange, billowing at the window of the heavens. "
― Beryl Bainbridge , The Birthday Boys
4 " The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour "
5 " Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood. "
6 " What we remember is probably fiction anyway. "
7 " Some people find it comfortable to go through life on their knees, and good luck to them, but I prefer to keep my spine in the position nature intended. "
8 " I don't know why everybody doesn't write because everybody talks. "
9 " There are many things in this life capable of throwing people off course - the death of someone close, the loss of income or health, the realisation that cherished hopes cannot always be fulfilled "
10 " A man bears the weight of his own body without knowing it, but he soon feels the weight of any other object. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that a man cannot forget- but not himself. "
― Beryl Bainbridge , Every Man for Himself
11 " ...he raised his eyes above the black shapes of the trees and saw a small moon, the colour of a lemon, dragged by clouds across the sky. Moons, he thought, were so that men like himself would know they lived here on earth. "
― Beryl Bainbridge , Another Part Of The Wood
12 " At night when they prepared for bed Freda removed all her clothes and lay like a great fretful baby, majestically dimpled and curved. Brenda wore her pajamas and her underwear and a tweed coat—that was the difference between them. "
― Beryl Bainbridge , The Bottle Factory Outing
13 " Mrs MacFarley called the valley the Glen. She called the light at early evening the gloaming. She liked to go Roaming in the Gloaming in the Glen. "
14 " I left him and went up on deck to look out at the slithering city, its glitter of street lamps fizzy under the rain. There’s something wrong about a ship in dock, something pathetic, like a bird fluttering in a spill of oil. The Nova was tethered to her berth by ropes and chains, caught in a pool of greasy water. I could feel her shifting under my feet, tugging to be free. "
15 " As a child she had been taught it was rude to say no, unless she didn't mean it. If she was offered another piece of cake and she wanted it she was obliged to refuse out of politeness. And if she didn't want it she had to say yes, even if it choked her. It was involved but understandable. "
16 " In every life there are pauses and interruptions... points of time where one course of action ends and another begins; and by vicissitude of fortune, or alteration of employment, by change of place or loss of friendship, we are forced to say of something, this is the last. "
― Beryl Bainbridge , According to Queeney
17 " I sense a space around him. He has a manner of eyeing people, even if he's standing face to face, as though he sees them from a distance. "
18 " She protested she’d rather freeze than wear the coat Lily had bought her. It was too big and it had a fur collar. ‘It sounds rather glamorous,’ he said. ‘That’s as maybe,’ she retorted. ‘It’s too much trouble. You have to paint your face if you wear a fur. It draws attention. "
― Beryl Bainbridge , An Awfully Big Adventure
19 " For all his worldliness he was shocked. He was afraid she was becoming corrupted. He had only to suggest she lift her hips a fraction higher or arch her back rather more sharply for her to comply at once. She began to add certain embellishments of her own. On their third night she ordered him quite roughly to bring his legs closer together and found a way of rubbing herself against his knee while sucking at his neck that made him shudder. "
20 " Rehearsing with Geoffrey would make it easier when the time came for Meredith to claim her. Penetration, from what she had gathered from library books, was inescapably painful unless one had played a lot of tennis or ridden stallions, and she hadn’t done either. "
