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Barbara Vine QUOTES

Barbara Vine QUOTES

1 " Having someone else in the house, a large, clever, overbearing yet indifferent presence, mitigates loneliness not at all. "

― Barbara Vine ,

2 " Ivo had grown more and more like one of those characters in his books who are always groaning about their miserable fate in helplessly loving someone unworthy of their love. Maugham never says much about what that’s like for the poor old unworthy object. I could have told him. It’s not exactly uplifting for the self-image. "

― Barbara Vine , No Night is Too Long

3 " Without me, without me,
Everyday's misery.
But with me - am I wrong?
No night is too long! "

― Barbara Vine , No Night is Too Long

4 " Our children, when young, are part of ourselves. When they grow up they are just other people. "

― Barbara Vine , The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

5 " His books distracted him for a while. They were like the aspirins you take when you've got a headache. They kill the pain for two hours and then it comes back. "

― Barbara Vine , Gallowglass

6 " Why do you always wear black?”
She delighted me with her answer, the correct, the only, answer. “I’m in mourning for my life. I’m unhappy. "

― Barbara Vine , No Night is Too Long

7 " Empty minds are abhorred by thought as vacuums are by nature. "

― Barbara Vine , A Fatal Inversion

8 " Love is about allowing. Love is about letting people be free. You leave the cage door open and if you're really loved, the bird flies back to be with you. That's the only kind of love worth having. "

― Barbara Vine , A Fatal Inversion

9 " The safest way to live is first, inherit money, second be born without a taste for liquor, third, have a legitimate job that keeps you busy, fourth, marry a wife who will cooperate in your sexual peculiarities, fifth, join some big church, sixth, don't live too long. "

― Barbara Vine , A Fatal Inversion

10 " Evil was a stupid word. It had the same sort of sense, largely meaningless, amorphous, diffuse, wooly, as applied to "love." Everyone had a vague idea of what it meant but none could precisely have defined it. It seemed, in a way, to imply something supernatural. "

― Barbara Vine , A Fatal Inversion

11 " Time, the best of all doctors, though it kills you in the end, had done more than therapy could. "

― Barbara Vine , A Fatal Inversion

12 " Is there any sadder sight than a burnt out library? "

― Barbara Vine , The Minotaur

13 " But it was more than that. There was an indefinable ingredient, a kind of excitement. It had something to do with history and the past, that excitement, and something to do with potential as well, with what Orwell or somebody had said. that every man really knew in his heart the finest place to be was the countryside on a summer's day. I was happy, that's what it was. "

― Barbara Vine , A Fatal Inversion

14 " Mark Twain had written somewhere: We are all mad at night. "

― Barbara Vine , A Fatal Inversion

15 " Life is too short to be so circumspect. "

― Barbara Vine , A Fatal Inversion

16 " By the age I was then I ought to know the truism that things always look different in the morning. As the night comes on and the deeper it gets, the more mad we are, the more prone to dreadful fears and fantasies. In the morning, not when we first wake up but gradually, things begin to look unlike what they looked like at eleven, at midnight. "

― Barbara Vine , The Child's Child

17 " Events in his own past he never thought of as evil but rather as mistaken, immensely regrettable, brought about by fear and greed. "

― Barbara Vine , A Fatal Inversion

18 " Lewis would have agreed with Oscar Wilde that our past is what we are. We cannot rid ourselves of it. "

― Barbara Vine , A Fatal Inversion

19 " The wonderful thing about the human mind is the way it copes when the worst happens. Beyond that worst happening you think there can be nothing, the unimaginable has taken place, and on the other side is death, destruction, the end. But the worst happens and you reel from it, you stagger, the shock is enormous, and then you begin to recover. You rally, you stand up and face it. You get used to it.
For what had happen was not the worst, you realize that. the worst was yet to come, was perhaps always yet to come, never would actually come, because if it did, you would know it, that would be reality, and there would be nothing then but to kill yourself. Quickly. "

― Barbara Vine , A Fatal Inversion

20 " A disturbing experience it had been, exciting and confusing. "

― Barbara Vine , A Fatal Inversion