Patrick Gale > Quotes

“I worry sometimes that we're apt to confuse forgiveness with forgetfulness. The potency of forgiveness comes precisely from the fact that it must be done while being goaded by an unhappy memory.”
― Patrick Gale

“He was not a scholar – his brain seemed too sluggish or too dreamy to grasp the things demanded of it – but he was never happier than when left alone among books, and would spend hours turning the pages of atlases, novels or tales from history, alive to the alternative versions of himself they seemed to proffer.”
― Patrick Gale, A Place Called Winter

“Bad men you want to kiss are the worst; he had only to use the right tone of voice and you offered your throat to the knife.”
― Patrick Gale, A Place Called Winter

“Might-have-beens are insidious, aren’t they, in the way they don’t ever quite lie still or go away.”
― Patrick Gale, A Perfectly Good Man

“Grief was a kind of illness, he maintained, and ran a course as predictable as measles or the common cold. Its fever always abated, given time and management, leaving the luckier among them with scars where love had been.”
― Patrick Gale, Notes from an Exhibition

“You don’t get over sorrow; you work your way right to the centre of it.”
― Patrick Gale, Notes from an Exhibition

“Like all their peers they went about things in the reverse order to the practice of their parents generation. They had sex, realised they got on really well then fell in love.”
― Patrick Gale, The Whole Day Through

“the law is a blind woman and the judge usually an unloved old man.”
― Patrick Gale, A Place Called Winter

“And she does not feel jilted, even one year on. Ben was weak or, fatal combination, weak and good. Jilting implied, if not malice, then aforethought and he was considerate to a fault and not a planner. As he had confessed all those months ago he was not the powerful one in his marriage, not when Chloe was near enough to influence him.
As the weeks wore on laura realised
that whatever offstage battle had taken place, she had lost. Chloe might not love him more, but her love it seemed, had proved the most tenacious. And, who knew, perhaps she had surprised them both with her strength of feeling. Perhaps it had taken such a crisis for him finally to fall in love with her and he had woken to the novel wonder of her as a man returning from a fever would be astounded at the mundane pleasure of grapes or daisies.”
― Patrick Gale, The Whole Day Through

“She believed the key element to patriotism was display; that it was all about being seen to support a cause, being seen to wave a flag.”
― Patrick Gale, A Place Called Winter

“He is like a traveler who looks left and right but doesn’t think to look behind or above him. Men like that get eaten by cougars.”
― Patrick Gale, A Place Called Winter

“The removal of alcohol from their lives seemed to have created more energy for disproval”
― Patrick Gale, A Sweet Obscurity

“It’s horrible being laughed at,’ he said. ‘People say you should be a good sport and get used to it, but the laughter never seems friendly and one never gets used to it. Or I don’t.”
― Patrick Gale, A Place Called Winter

“The removal of alcohol from their lives seemed to have created more energy for disapproval”
― Patrick Gale, A Sweet Obscurity

“Any problems writ small in courtship loomed large in marriage”
― Patrick Gale, Tree Surgery for Beginners

“As for the so-called (sanitary) towels, wearing one soon felt like having a sizeable dead hamster tucked between her legs”
― Patrick Gale, Friendly Fire

“I’m a hopeless conversationalist. I’d always rather listen.”
― Patrick Gale, A Place Called Winter

“women and children – the ‘useless mouths’, Churchill chillingly called them – had been abruptly and inefficiently shipped out at the start of hostilities so that the colony could become a garrison.”
― Patrick Gale, Mother's Boy: A beautifully crafted novel of war, Cornwall, and the relationship between a mother and son

“Since the affliction was so plainly psychosomatic, the worst thing she could do was to give it space for thought.”
― Patrick Gale, The Aerodynamics of Pork