Home > Work > A Spot of Bother
21 " The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely. How anyone could work in the same office for ten years or bring up children without putting certain things to the back of their mind was beyond him. "
― Mark Haddon , A Spot of Bother
22 " Maybe George was fooling himself. Maybe old people always fooled themselves, pretending that the world was going to hell because it was easier than admitting they were being left behind, that the future was pulling away from the beach and they were standing on their little island bidding it good riddance, knowing in their hearts that there was nothing left for them to do but sit around on the shingle waiting for the big disease to come out of the undergrowth. "
23 " Never trust a man who doesn't like animals. That's my rule. "
24 " She understood now. You got married in spite of your wedding not because of it. "
25 " Ray was disappointed by the (Millenium) wheel. Too well engineered, he said. He wanted the wind in his hair and a rusty handrail and the faint pssibility that the whole structure might collapse. "
26 " When he finally let the car it was because e could no longer bear his own company in such a confined space. "
27 " School might have been shit, but at least it was simple. "
28 " If he wasn’t careful he’d turn into one of those men who cared more about furniture than human beings. He’d end up living with someone else who cared more about furniture than human beings and they’d lead a life which looked perfectly normal from the outside but was, in truth, a kind of living death that left your heart looking like a raisin. Or "
29 " At home he was reading Pet Sematary, but reading that in public was like leaving the house in your underwear. "
30 " He sat on the tube knowing he was going to hell. The only way to reduce the hot forks when he got there was to ring Katie and Mum as soon as he got home. An "
31 " What he felt mostly was a relentless, grinding dread which rumbled and thundered and made the world dark, like those spaceships in science-fiction films whose battle-scorched fuselages slid onto the screen and kept on sliding onto the screen because they were, in fact, several thousand times larger than you expected when all you could see was the nose cone. The "
32 " Fu tentato di iniziare un altro dei regali di Natale ancora non letti. Ma bisognava lasciare che l’atmosfera di un libro si diradasse, prima di buttarsi nel prossimo [...] "
33 " He wanted to make her feel good. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had done that. He "
34 " Strange to discover that describing his fears out loud was less frightening than trying not to think about them. Something about seeing your enemy out in the open. The "
35 " Most men wanted to tell you what they knew. The route to Wisbech. How to get a log fire going. David made her feel she was the one who knew things. He "
36 " To be honest, I’m trying to maintain a Buddhist detachment about the whole thing to stop it taking ten years off my life. "
37 " Sweet mother if God thought George, surely this was not going to involve him? "George"? It was. "
38 " Perhaps the best you could hope for was not to do the same thing to your own children. "
39 " Lord alone knows.” George stood up and dropped his empty mug into the sink. “The mystery of one’s children is never-ending. "
40 " But you reached a stage where you realized it was a waste of energy trying to change your parents’ minds about anything, ever. "