Brian Moore > Quotes

“Love isn't an act, it's a whole life.”
― Brian Moore

“Don't you know that love isn't just going to bed? Love isn't an act, it's a whole life. It's staying with her now because she needs you; it's knowing you and she will still care about each other when sex and daydreams, fights and futures -- when all that's on the shelf and done with. Love -- why, I'll tell you what love is: it's you at seventy-five and her at seventy-one, each of you listening for the other's step in the next room, each afraid that a sudden silence, a sudden cry, could mean a lifetime's talk is over.”
― Brian Moore

“Love - why, I'll tell you what love is: it's you at 75 and her at 71, each of you listening for the other's step in the next room, each afraid that a sudden silence, a sudden cry, could mean a lifetime's talk is over.”
― Brian Moore, The Luck of Ginger Coffey

“And maybe, although it was a thing you could hardly bear to think about, like death or your last judgment, maybe he would be the last one ever and he would walk away now and it would only be a question of waiting for it all to end and hoping for better things in the next world. But that was silly, it was never too late.”
― Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

“Love isn’t an act, it’s a whole life.

It’s staying with [them] now because [they] need you; it’s knowing you... will still care about each other when sex and daydreams, fights and futures—when all that’s on the shelf and done with.”
― Brian Moore, The Luck of Ginger Coffey

“She watched the glass, a plain woman, changing all to the delightful illusion of beauty. There was still time: for her ugliness was destined to bloom late, hidden first by the unformed gawkiness of youth, budding to plainness in young womanhood and now flowering to slow maturity in her early forties, it still awaited the subtle garishness which only decay could bring to fruition: a garishness which, when arrived at, would preclude all efforts at the mirror game.”
― Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

“O, she said, a woman in love can't afford to be proud. He must be made to see, he must be made to come back. And I must do it myself, no matter how silly it looks.”
― Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

“For it was important to have things to tell which interested your friends. And Miss Hearne had always been able to find interesting happenings where other people would find only dullness. It was, she often felt, a gift which was one of the great rewards of a solitary life. And a necessary gift. Because, when you were a single girl, you had to find interesting things to talk about. Other women always had their children and shopping and running a house to chat about. Besides which, their husbands often told them interesting stories. But a single girl was in a different position. People simply didn’t want to hear how she managed things like accommodation and budgets. She had to find other subjects and other subjects were mostly other people. So people she knew, people she had heard of, people she saw in the street, people she had read about, they all had to be collected and gone through like a basket of sewing so that the most interesting bits about them could be picked out and fitted together to make conversation.”
― Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

“When a thing is told to you and you can't remember it happening it doesn't count somehow. It is as though it had nothing to do with you. Remembering, that's what counts.”
― Brian Moore, Fergus

“And the bell jangled, the driver started. The bus whirled off, to the last stop, the lonely room, the lonely night.”
― Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

“We had not written or phoned or called or even sent a lousy card. We were young: we had our troubles. If there is a hell it should be for selfishness.”
― Brian Moore, I Am Mary Dunne

“What could he be thinking of? He seemed to be trying to remember something, perhaps an engagement, perhaps an excuse to leave her. For eventually, they all made some excuse.”
― Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

“He was a horrid-looking fellow. Fat as a pig he was, and his face was the colour of cottage cheese. His collar was unbuttoned and his silk tie was spotted with egg stain. His stomach stuck out like a sagging pillow and his little thin legs fell away under it to end in torn felt slippers. He was all bristly blond jowls, tiny puffy hands and long blond curly hair, like some monstrous baby swelled to man size.”
― Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

“What about those men you read about in newspaper stories who walk out of their homes saying they are going down to the corner to buy cigarettes and are never heard from again? This is Paris. I am here. What if I never go back?”
― Brian Moore, The Doctor's Wife

“The Protestants don't believe in Britain and the Catholics don't believe in God. And none of us believes in the future.”
― Brian Moore, The Doctor's Wife

“. . . the dead are now avenged. This case is closed.”
― Brian Moore, The Statement

“She held him, her arms tight about him, she had never understood it, but when they met, she and her sister and brothers, suddenly all of their wives, husbands, and children seemed members of another race, no part of the Family, that family whose allegiances antedated all others.”
― Brian Moore, The Doctor's Wife

“They don't ask for favours, for daily bread, for forgiveness from of trespasses, deliverance from temptation and evil. All they ask is God's help to guide them in the right path. isn't that what all of us should ask?”
― Brian Moore, The Magician's Wife

“In the carnival hall of mirrors which is our memory, we distort what we see. In Ernie's mirror image of me, I am magnified, elongated into a girl who led him on, the object of his great, unhappy, unfulfilled love. While he, in the equal if opposite distortion of my mind's mirror, is reduced to a squat manikin from my past, a dull stranger, remembered only for his minor quirks.”
― Brian Moore, I Am Mary Dunne

“I am, always have been, a fool who rushes in, a blurter-out of awkward truths, a speaker-up at parties who, the morning after, filled with guilt, vows that never again, no matter what, but who, faced at the very next encounter with someone whose opinions strike me as unfair, rushes in again, blurting out, breaking all vows.”
― Brian Moore, I Am Mary Dunne

“    There, in the dining-room, amid the wreck of dinner glasses, dishes, wine bottles, there settled on all three of us an instant of total immobility, as though the film of our lives had jammed. We sat, frozen in stop frame, until, suddenly, Ernie's head jerked forward and he turned to me, his face screwed up in a painful parody of a boy's embarrassed grin. 'Yes,' he said. 'I guess I have finished. Eh, Maria? Golly, I've gone and done it again. Made a fool of myself, imposed on people's kindness, irritated the people I most want to be friends with. You and Terence. Golly.'
    Having castigated himself, he, like all those people who are quick to apologize, considered himself at once forgiven. He grinned again and said, 'What a horse's ass I am. I'll bet that's what you're thinking?' ”
― Brian Moore, I Am Mary Dunne

“How did I get so bogged down in ordinariness that even this once I couldn't do the spontaneous thing, the thing I really wanted to do. The future is forbidden to no one. Unless we forbid it ourselves.”
― Brian Moore, The Doctor's Wife