Amanda Craig

A hundred years ago, people had perfectly understood that you could die of a broken heart, now they thought you were making a fuss about nothing_Certain kinds of suffering are like radiation: they cause furious growth and mutation of the inner self.

Novelists,_ said Ivo, __re to the nineties what cooks were to the eighties, hairdressers to the seventies and pop-stars to the sixties_ Merely, you know, an expression of the Zeitgeist, Nobody actually reads novels any more, but it__ a fashionable thing to be a novelist _ as long as you don__ entertain people of course. I sometimes think,_ said Ivo, his eyes like industrial diamonds, __hat my sole virtue is, I__ the only person in London who has no intention of writing any kind of novel, ever.

But this city is a world of its own, a country within a country. People are used to taking the old and making it news; and used, too, to taking the new and making it old. Every glass of water from its taps, it is said, has passed six times through the kidneys of another, and every scrap of its land has been trodden on, fought over, dug up and broken down for centuries.

To thoughtful natures, events are like depth charges: the surface is calm, but the shock spreads further.

It__ the remarkable thing about academics: they look at Shakespeare and always see their own faces in him.

I knew exactly when the fever had struck. I had been reading Hamlet in an English class at school. Everyone else stumbled, puzzling over the strange words. Then it had been my turn, and the language had suddenly woken in me, so that my heart and lungs and tongue and throat were on fire. Later, I understood that this was why people spoke of Shakespeare as a god. At the time, I felt like weeping. Somebody had released me from dumbness, from utter isolation. I knew that I could live inside these words, that they would give me a a shape, a shell. I had no idea, then, that I would never play Hamlet_. I__ an actor, and in a good year I earn eleven thousand pounds for dressing up as a carrot.

Hatred bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Polly was all too aware that much of her time on holiday would be spent doing the laundry and the cooking and the child-care and all the other chores that back in London would be shared with her cleaning lady. A holiday with Theo and the children represented two weeks of domestic and maternal drudgery.

The idea that any of their offspring could possibly be accused of involvement in criminal activities caused deep offence, even to parents who believed that property was theft.

It__ not by accident that people talk of a state of confusion as not being able to see the wood for the trees, or of being out of the woods when some crisis is surmopunted. It is a place of loss, confusion, terror and anger, a place where you can, like Dante, find yourself going down into Hell. But if it__ any comfort, the dark wood isn__ just that. It__ also a place of opportunity and adventure. It is the place in which fortunes can be reversed, hearts mended, hopes reborn.

All age is a kind of tiredness, I think. When you__e young, the lines never show. Every morning you wake unmarked, wiped clear by sleep. One day, though, you see lines that itch, as though some crumb of existence has been creased into your skin. They can never be smoothed away, and after a while you forget that this heavy, irritable feeling wasn__ always there.

All paradises are there to be expelled from.

If you read fairy tales carefully, you__l notice they are mostly about people who aren__ heroes. They don__ have special powers, or gifts. Often they are despised as stupid, They are bullied, beaten up, robbed, starved. But they find they are stronger than their misfortunes.

I__e noticed that whenever institutions claim to be confident of anything it means the complete opposite.

Just about the worst thing an artist can do is to try and be a nice person.

You know the only rule you need to know to get on in this country? __ever complain, never explain.

I am a Jewish mother. My dying words will be, __ut a jumper on