Malcolm Pryce > Quotes

“The train slowed down at the approach to shrewsbury station and glided between the eleventh-century abbey and the stadium of shrewsbury town football club. Two sacred arenas where men chanted and waited for a miracle that never came.”
― Malcolm Pryce, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being In Aberystwyth

“That's the trouble with people like you, Knight, you only know how to mock. How to break things. You don't know how to create anything. You never did.”
― Malcolm Pryce, Aberystwyth Mon Amour

“It was partly the buzz you get at any big fight but also there was the build-up of static brought on by the rustling of pacamacs, and which had on occasion, so they said, given rise to the appearance of ball-lightning at these events.”
― Malcolm Pryce, Last Tango in Aberystwyth

“... it seems to me there are two schools of thought. One you find in gift shops, written on trinkets adorned with pink hearts, on little notebooks and diaries and teddies and stuff; it says, “If you love them, let them go.” And then there’s the other school of thought, the Louie Knight school, which says, “If you love someone, don’t let them go.” The first one is fine if you live in a gift shop or if your supply of happiness on this earth is as plentiful and uninterrupted as the gas that comes through the mains. But if you’re like me and you find that most of the time the gas is cut off, you can’t afford to be so prodigal.”
― Malcolm Pryce, Don't Cry For Me Aberystwyth

“No, the truth about love is this: if they’d missed the bus they would now be saying the same things about a person they met five minutes later on the Prom; their love was an accident; their lover just a nobody, gift-wrapped by their own imagination. There was nothing uncanny about it. They should have kept the drawbridge to their hearts closed; kept the moat free from weed.”
― Malcolm Pryce, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being In Aberystwyth

“For reasons we can only guess at, it is said that God decides before we are born which of us are to be saved and which consigned to eternal damnation; and not just before we were born, but before anyone was born. Before He started work on the universe, before He had even laid the first brick, it had been ordained who would be lost and who would be saved; and which of us would serve our time in Aberystwyth. Nothing we do on this earth makes a blind bit of difference. God pulls the arm, the wheels spin, we are damned or saved. All you can do is hope He gives better odds than the publican.”
― Malcolm Pryce, Don't Cry For Me Aberystwyth

“That was the remarkable thing about paper, you can leave it lying in the back of the cupboard drawer for years and when you take it out it retains a trace of scent, sometimes enough to ambush the heart with the memory of a long-lost love.”
― Malcolm Pryce, From Aberystwyth with Love

“You track with the heart, not the eyes. The eyes are easily deceived; easiest thing in the world to show something that isn't true and make people believe it.”
― Malcolm Pryce, The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still

“God is Santa Claus for grown-ups, not a misery-guts, not an asshole; we've got enough of those in town already. I didn't believe; but the guy I didn't believe in wasn't like that. He was a warm, smiling chap, overflowing with benevolence; someone you looked up to with the same bafflement and confused wonder and absolute trust that you had for the giants who put you on your potty when you were two. He was a nice guy who would make it all right; who understood; the one guy you never had to explain your screw-ups to. He smelled good, too: of pews and old hassocks, floor polish and musty velvet drapes, of candle wax and mildewed pages. He resided in the tranquility that can fill even the heart of an unbeliever in old churches, where the eye and the spirit are soothed by the flicker of golden candlelight and the gentle but vivid hues from the stained-glass good guys above the altar. And the great thing about Him was, He was human. You could feel sorry for Him. I knew there could be only one reason why He let us suffer like this: He can't find a way to stop it. Like a roller-coaster ride that gets too scary, there's no way off. He set it in motion and now He's as helpless as the rest of us.”
― Malcolm Pryce, Don't Cry For Me Aberystwyth

“Those fools, the poets, compare a girl in the bloom of youth to a flower. But that’s not right; flowers are too tough. A soap bubble would be better. A thing of wonder, too fragile to exist.”
― Malcolm Pryce, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being In Aberystwyth

“Seventh rule of being a private eye: when faced with only two possibilities, both of which are hopeless, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to agonise over the decision.”
― Malcolm Pryce, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being In Aberystwyth

“Every policeman knows the truth: there is no limit to the things that people will do to other people. And every torturer knows the way to make a man betray himself. It doesn’t matter how tough he is, how many torments he can endure on his own body, he can’t endure even the whisper of evil being done to his darling.”
― Malcolm Pryce, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being In Aberystwyth

“It's as if some master perfumer and necromancer had foreseen all the broken promises of your life to come, all the pangs of unrequited love and unreturned letters; the torment of watching a phone that never rings; the bright expectancy of fresh hope at breakfast, in ruins by sunset ... it was as if he took all these things and blended them into a single fragrance and called it whatever the French is for Disappointment — Désolé or Chagrin or something.”
― Malcolm Pryce, Last Tango in Aberystwyth

“That's how it can happen sometimes. Just when you thought there was nothing left for Fortune to throw at you, she deals you a low blow. Kindness.”
― Malcolm Pryce, The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still

“That's silly, the people in prison are thieves and murderers.'
'So are the ones in the castle. How else do you get to own a castle?”
― Malcolm Pryce, The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still

“She reached the door and added, ‘Myfanwy says you drink too much rum. I think she was right.’
‘It’s my aftershave.’
‘Well, then, you drink too much aftershave.”
― Malcolm Pryce, Don't Cry For Me Aberystwyth

“In the night, when the world hates you, it helps to sleep in the arms of someone who doesn't.”
― Malcolm Pryce, The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still

“If you qualify for a reward for the help you've given us, do you want the Lego?'
'The what?'
'The Lego. You know what it is, I take it.'
Eleri looked slightly hurt. 'Don't be silly. Of course I do. It's Latin for "I build", isn't it?”
― Malcolm Pryce, Don't Cry For Me Aberystwyth

“– Второе правило частного детектива.
Она посмотрела на меня с интересом:
– Это какое?
– Береги башмаки.
Амба нахмурилась.
– Это означает, что ни к чему трепать кожу на подметках, слоняясь по городу, когда многое можно сделать головой.
– А первое правило частного детектива?
– Не становиться частным детективом.”
― Malcolm Pryce , Aberystwyth Mon Amour

“A journey on a day that you could say was my idea of heaven.”
― Malcolm Pryce, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being In Aberystwyth

“...It's a college rule: we must always take off our hats when see a fellow scholar.'
I pulled a face and she continued, burning with conviction, 'Oh, come on, Mr Knight. Don't tell me you've never seen someone doff a cap before.'
'I'm familiar with the custom, but not in this context. The normal way to make a man remove his hat in that town is to punch him on the jaw.”
― Malcolm Pryce, Don't Cry For Me Aberystwyth

“For all the differences that divide us from humanity across the sea or down the centuries, it is through suffering that we maintain a common bond.”
― Malcolm Pryce, From Aberystwyth with Love

“Words are such wonderful things that they deceive us, we fail to see how even the simplest things so often lie beyond their reach; we can describe spaceships and translucent sea creatures that live on the floor of the ocean trench, but we have no way to describe the subtly differing currents that sweep through the channels of our own hearts. Words are brass coal tongs with which we seek to caress butterflies. When the veils of memory are torn asunder, and the raw experience is released like scent in the mind, the coal tongs snap on empty air.”
― Malcolm Pryce, From Aberystwyth with Love

“A wise man once said there are three ways to find a fool. He is a fool that seeks that which he cannot find; he is a fool that seeks that which being found will do him more harm than good; he is a fool that, having a variety of ways to bring him to his journey's end, takes that which is worst.”
― Malcolm Pryce, From Aberystwyth with Love

“You know me, Louie, I never take sides.'
'Your kiosk is a moral Switzerland.”
― Malcolm Pryce, Last Tango in Aberystwyth

“One thing you learn in life is almost everything your grandmother told you when you were young, and which you thought at the time was just the lunacy of old age, is actually true.”
― Malcolm Pryce, The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still

“All men, if they are honest, are scared of the dark. The arrival of light, even a glimmer under the edge of a door, lifts the spirit in a way that can’t be described, because it dates back to a time before language. Hope returns, night terrors evaporate. You smile at the childishness of it all, the demons who haunted your sleep. It was just a dream.”
― Malcolm Pryce, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being In Aberystwyth