Keith Roberts > Quotes

“Becky walked to the sea late in the day, trod barefoot among the tumbled blocks of stone that lined the foreshore, smelling the old harsh smell of salt, hearing the water slap and chuckle while from high above came the endless sinister trickling of the cliffs. Into her consciousness stole, maybe for the first time, the sense of loneliness; an oppression born of the gentle miles of summer water, the tall blackness of the headlands, the fingers of the stone ledges pushing out into the sea.”
― Keith Roberts, Pavane

“The firm of Strange had not been built on softness; what you stole from it, you were welcome to keep.”
― Keith Roberts, Pavane

“She remembered how one day she’d gone running to him with a shell, told him to listen and hear the waves inside. He’d taken time off from his endless making of money and driven her way up into the hills and found a quarry and dug a fossil out the rocks and made her put that to her ear as well; she’d heard the same singing and he’d told her that was the noise the years made, all the millions of them shut inside buzzing to get free. She kept the stone a long while after that; and when more time had passed and she knew the whispering and piping were only echoes of her blood she did’t care because she’d still heard what she heard, the sound of trapped eternities.”
― Keith Roberts, Pavane

“To wake, and sleep, and know that one is loved; to hear, as I hear now, the whisper of a footfall; to feel the touch of hands; these things, above all else, are to be desired. I count myself fortunate, in that, for a little while, I have known them.”
― Keith Roberts, The Boat of Fate

“It's like a...dance somehow, a minuet or a pavane. Something stately and pointless, with all its steps set out. With a beginning, and an end...
Sir John, sometimes I think life's all a mass of significance, all sorts of strands and threads woven like a tapestry or a brocade. So if you pulled one out or broke it the pattern would alter right back through the cloth. Then I think...it's all totally pointless, it would make just as much sense backwards as forwards, effects leading to causes and those to more effects...maybe that's what will happen, when we get to the end of Time.”
― Keith Roberts, Pavane