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“There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive for action or change.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Action #Spirit #Consciousness
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“And when I was young, did I ever tell you, I always wanted to get inside a book and never come out again? I loved reading so much I wanted to be a part of it, and there were some books I could have stayed in for ever.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Reading #Book #Young
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“London goes beyond any boundary or convention.It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Wish #Noble #Gestures
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“My great fear has always been complete and utter failure. Hence, you see, all the dispossessed people in my fiction, and why I try to earn as much money as I can. It's a defense. I don't enjoy it or do anything with it.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#People #Trying #Fiction
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“So do we discover, in the world, that our worst fears are unfulfilled; yet we must fear, in order that we may feel delight.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Order #World #May
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“Murderers will try to recall the sequence of events, they will remember exactly what they did just before and just after. But they can never remember the actual moment of killing. This is why they will always leave a clue.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Trying #Events #Remember
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“No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his poetry, we can join him there.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Childhood #Secret #Caves
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“What captivity has been to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish. For us, the romance of our native land begins only after we have left home; it is really only with other people that we become Irishmen.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Home #Land #People
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“And the smell of the library was always the same - the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the chief librarian had once described as 'the steam of the social soup.'”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Smell #Clothes #Creating
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“I am in the Pitte, but I have gone so deep that I can see the brightness of the Starres at Noon.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Brightness #Gone #Noon
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“Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early Middle Ages. There's hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent rioting of one kind or another. They happen so frequently that they are almost part of London's texture.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Years #Age #Texture
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“I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Philosophy #Reading #Remember
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“Yet, like the sea and the gallows, London refuses nobody.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Sea #London #Gallows
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“As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Shadow #World #Able
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“Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Book #Long #Chapters
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“Freud was just a novelist.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Novelists
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“It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Soul #Body #Strange
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“Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Imagination #Force #Changed
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“I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge, I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my Cockney accent.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Class #Effort #Lasts
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“Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Heart #Echoes #Dickens
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“I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Thinking #Biographies #Fiction
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“I love soap operas - the stories, the plots! And I love the game shows and the courtroom dramas and the detectives - Jessica Fletcher, 'Columbo,' 'Perry Mason,' 'L.A. Law.' Any sense of guilt appeals to me in a television program - a sense of guilt, or a sense of making a lot of money.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Drama #Law #Games
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“He stood beneath the white tower, and looked up at it with that mournful expression which his face always carried in repose: for one moment he thought of climbing up its cracked and broken stone, and then from its summit screaming down at the silent city as a child might scream at a chained animal.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Children #Animal #Climbing
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“The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Journey #Endless
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“I have liv'd long enough for others, like the Dog in the Wheel, and it is now the Season to begin for myself: I cannot change that Thing call'd Time, but I can alter its Posture and, as Boys do turn a looking-glass against the Sunne, so I will dazzle you all.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Dog #Boys #Glasses
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“The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Sea #World
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“The best years are when you know what you're doing.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Years
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“Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Writing #Piano #Division
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“Sometimes the silences, the gaps, tell us more than anything else.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Silence #Gaps #Sometimes
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“Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade.”
-- Peter Ackroyd
#Doe #Trade #Free Trade
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