Graham Swift Quotes and Sayings - Page 2
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“And I didn't know I loved her till I'd dreamt of her. I didn't know it was the real thing until an illusion had signalled it.”
-- Graham Swift -
“There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on--a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion.”
-- Graham Swift -
“How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it's so slow and sweet and everlasting.”
-- Graham Swift -
“What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.”
-- Graham Swift -
“Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings?”
-- Graham Swift -
“When people aren't expecting to be seen, they look their truest.”
-- Graham Swift -
“Ah, children, pity level-crossing keepers, pity lock-keepers - pity lighthouse-keepers - pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers), caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon...”
-- Graham Swift -
“Literature is the voice of the human heart.”
-- Graham Swift -
“I can do hieroglyphics in the margin. There are days when I really enjoy the flow of ink. I mean, nice pen, ink straight on to the page.”
-- Graham Swift -
“I like the world we've got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.”
-- Graham Swift -
“Structure that really pays off is all based on emotion. I don't write down an elaborate plan. It's really done by feel. It's one area of my writing that I think I've got surer at as I've evolved. In my work you often get an abrupt shift in time, a jolt. But the emotional logic will take the reader on. I hope. I trust. After all, our memories do not work with any sequential logic.”
-- Graham Swift -
“I am struck by the way people behave on the Tube. They look at each other beadily and inquisitively, and something goes on in their thoughts which must be equivalent to the way dogs and other animals, when they meet, sniff each other's arses and nuzzle each other's fur.”
-- Graham Swift -
“What does education do, what does it have to offer, when deprived of its necessary partner, the future, and face instead with - no future at all?”
-- Graham Swift -
“There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress. It doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress I the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-ending retrieving what it lost. A dogged and vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.”
-- Graham Swift -
“Pillow talk. It's how you know, it's how you tell, that something different, something special is happening: that this might even be the most important night of your life. Some day -some night- I hope you both may know it, with whoever it may be: the wish, stealing up on you, not to just merge bodies, but all you have, all your years, all your memories up to that point. And why should you wish to do that, if you haven't already guessed that your future too, will be shared?”
-- Graham Swift
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