Barbara > Barbara's Quotes

“Exit, pursued by a bear.”
― William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

“I suppose the fundamental distinction between Shakespeare and myself is one of treatment. We get our effects differently. Take the familiar farcical situation of someone who suddenly discovers that something unpleasant is standing behind them. Here is how Shakespeare handles it in "The Winter's Tale," Act 3, Scene 3:

ANTIGONUS: Farewell! A lullaby too rough. I never saw the heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour! Well may I get aboard! This is the chase: I am gone for ever.

And then comes literature's most famous stage direction, "Exit pursued by a bear." All well and good, but here's the way I would handle it:

BERTIE: Touch of indigestion, Jeeves?
JEEVES: No, Sir.
BERTIE: Then why is your tummy rumbling?
JEEVES: Pardon me, Sir, the noise to which you allude does not emanate from my interior but from that of that animal that has just joined us.
BERTIE: Animal? What animal?
JEEVES: A bear, Sir. If you will turn your head, you will observe that a bear is standing in your immediate rear inspecting you in a somewhat menacing manner.
BERTIE (as narrator): I pivoted the loaf. The honest fellow was perfectly correct. It was a bear. And not a small bear, either. One of the large economy size. Its eye was bleak and it gnashed a tooth or two, and I could see at a g. that it was going to be difficult for me to find a formula. "Advise me, Jeeves," I yipped. "What do I do for the best?"
JEEVES: I fancy it might be judicious if you were to make an exit, Sir.
BERTIE (narrator): No sooner s. than d. I streaked for the horizon, closely followed across country by the dumb chum. And that, boys and girls, is how your grandfather clipped six seconds off Roger Bannister's mile.

Who can say which method is superior?"

(As reproduced in Plum, Shakespeare and the Cat Chap )”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Over Seventy: An Autobiography with Digressions

“I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting”
― William Shakespeare

“It is an heretic that makes the fire,
Not she which burns in't.”
― William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

“But Fr Gaunt was so clipped and trim he had no antennae at all for grief. He was like a singer who knows the words and can sing, but cannot sing the song as conceived in the heart of the composer. Mostly he was dry. He spoke over young and old with the same dry music. But”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“three living men had seen horrors, and those who see horrors may do horrors just as bad, that is the law of life and war. Soon”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“moment in the history of every beaten child when his mind parts with hopes of dignity – pushes off hope like a boat without a rower, and lets it go as it will on the stream, and resigns himself to the tally stick of pain. This is a ferocious”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“my mother’s wits were now in an attic of her head which had neither door nor stair, or at least none that I could find.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“He carried a highly ecclesiastical umbrella, like something real and austere, that said its prayers at night in the hatstand. I”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“I’ve never seen what he looks like but his disembodied voice is almost godlike in the way it booms from nowhere and reaches everyone, in the way it’s terribly indistinct but probably trying to tell us something. Now”
― Sara Baume, Spill Simmer Falter Wither

“She had once tried to copy Jojo’s sexy wink – drink had been taken – but she had simply succeeded in dislodging her contact lens which had made her eyelid flutter like a trapped butterfly.”
― Marian Keyes, The Other Side of the Story

“What is so wrong with us that we rush into situations to which we are manifestly unsuited, which will hurt us and others? Why are we given emotions which we cannot control and which move in exact contradiction to what we really want? We are walking conflicts, internal battles on legs and if human beings were cars, we would return them for being faulty.”
― Marian Keyes, The Other Side of the Story

“Anton and I went to see her in her office in Soho. It was less than a fortnight before I gave birth to Ema so getting me there was a huge undertaking, like crating and transporting a sick elephant.”
― Marian Keyes, The Other Side of the Story

“As always she was kitted out in the pristine pastels of baby clothes and her little plimsolls were so white my eyes ached. To look directly at them one would need a piece of cardboard with a hole in it, of the type used for viewing a solar eclipse.”
― Marian Keyes, The Other Side of the Story

“At all times a heavy ceramic casserole would sit on a pale blue Aga, so should people drop in unexpectedly, I could wander out in my bare feet, welcome them warmly, give them dinner, then press my home-made elderberry wine on them. I would be like Nigella Lawson.”
― Marian Keyes, The Other Side of the Story

“bodies becoming like prisons with the person stuck inside. Screaming, or not screaming, but staring at you like you should do something.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“All those people,” Clark said to Imaginary Robert, but Imaginary Robert didn’t reply.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“People always want to direct a visitor to their favourite place,”
― Victoria Hislop, Cartes Postales from Greece

“as was so often the case with anger, it was really just fear projecting outwards. The society was nothing – it had no”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“played the piano every night and made the most superficial acquaintances with poets and painters and artists that often only lasted a night.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“I loved her, instantly. Of course, most parents love their children instantly. But I mention it here because I still find it a remarkable thing. Where was that love before? Where did you acquire it from? The way it is suddenly there, total and complete, as sudden as grief, but in reverse, is one of the wonders about being human.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“Yes, there had been a void inside me, but voids were underrated. Voids were empty of love but also pain. Emptiness was not without its advantages. You could move around in emptiness.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“But if you stick with it, the elements of familiarity become clear. The current rhythm is speeding up. I am approaching a crescendo. Everything is happening all at once. That is one of the patterns: when nothing is happening, nothing continues to happen, but after a while the lull becomes too much and the drums need to kick in. Something has to happen. Often that need comes from yourself.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“Actions create reactions. When things start to happen, other things start to happen. But sometimes it seems there is no explanation as to why the things are happening – why all the buses are coming along at once – why life’s moments of luck and pain arrive in clusters. All we can do is observe the pattern, the rhythm, and then live it.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“She was one of a group of girls he’d observed bloom from scraggly weeds into tropical beauties who churned the air around them into a dense humidity.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“The nettles and cow parsley came up in swathes, the bindweed trumpeting through the hedges,”
― Jon McGregor, Reservoir 13

“There is nothing pleasant to be said about losing,” she began, “and the Obolensky boy is a pill. But, Sasha, my dear, why on earth would you give him the satisfaction?”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“But in a period of abundance any half-wit with a spoon can please a palate.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Having acknowledged that a man must master his circumstances or otherwise be mastered by them, the Count thought it worth considering how one was most likely to achieve this aim when one had been sentenced to a life of confinement.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“But Fate would not have the reputation it has if it simply did what it seemed it would do.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow