fraser > fraser's Quotes

“Hindsight is a dish best served earlier, but it never is. It is inevitably served after the bill has been paid, when you are fucked and full and powerless and bloated and stumbling.”
― Madeleine Gray, Green Dot

“Courtship, to me, was about text messages. It was about sending someone a good-morning and a good-night message. It was ending every text with an x, or three x's, or a long line of them when you were really pleased. It was about withholding x's when you were moody, and then they would notice, and ask you what was wrong. These were the rules of love I had learned from my all-girls school, and it confused me when someone didn't play.”
― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident

“Some plans get made and they drop right into your hand like a warm egg. ... Others feel vague from conception, and carry on feeling vague no matter how many details you hammer onto them.”
― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident

“Relationships grow in the cradle they are born in.”
― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident

“It's a tense summer. It's June. Dehydrated office workers spew from Tube station with frayed nerves and anxiety. On every beautiful day, people feel compelled to look out their window and say, 'It's very worrying, isn't it?' as if it were tasteless to comment on the warm sun and blue sky without remarking on the mass extinction of humans and whales within the same breath. The air is warm and damp. No bedsheet is un-drenched, and everything, everywhere is sticky with sweat. The hours of each day are rationed between unbearable heat and biblical rain, and even though it has only been this way for three weeks, it is impossible to imagine that things have been any other way. People move slowly, if they move at all, and no one has thought a coherent thought all month.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“He wishes he saw her more often, but friendship in London means bumping into each other once or twice a year, saying you need to hang out more, and never doing anything about it.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“He thinks of himself as a good communicator. He thinks of himself as having transcended the stereotype of men as being unable to describe their feelings. But around his family he becomes the most repressed of all, like the sad old patriarchs who were brought up to believe that the strength of society relies on their continued silence.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“Like so much of life, the full import of someone's words is often only revealed many years later, by which time that person has already slipped into the past.”
― Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square

“As I say, in China, you may not be particularly interested in politics. But politics sure has an interest in you.”
― Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square

“Perhaps that is the most powerful form of repression. When you can't say anything or you don't feel any more. Not because there is some external power or rule preventing you. But because there is something in yourself that prevents you. That makes you both the prison and the prisoner.”
― Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square

“Sometimes we feel the dark shadow of what is to come creeping closer, and yet from the bustle and light of the present – our routines, our sense of everyday normality – we convince ourselves that the darkness on the periphery is not really there. That little mistake – the confusion of names, the forgetting of something that occurred only a few hours before – we tell ourselves it is nothing, that such things happen all the time. They are not important in the scheme of things.

And we ignore that deeper, more elemental voice. The one that is telling us they are important.

That they are the most important thing of all.”
― Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square

“By the question of begetting I mean something of larger and deeper significance, something that is born from, and spreads around it, a rich and complicated moral background, a question that consists of other questions. To ask the question of begetting is to ask, 'What does it mean to bring a new creature into the world?' It is to ask, 'What does it mean to decide to perform an act of creation? What does it mean to make the decision that life is worth living on behalf of a person who cannot be consulted?' it is to interrogate one's own responsibility and commitments, morally and philosophically and also personally. To ask the question of begetting is to know, to admit to oneself, that this question can never be purely one of personal inclination, however much we might wish it to be.”
― Mara Van Der Lugt, Begetting: What Does It Mean to Create a Child?

“The question of begetting is not simply 'to decide whether or not life is worth bringing into existence', but rather, what it means to make that decision on behalf of another person; to decide whether it can be justified to bring a wholly new and unknown life into existence; and whether it is worth the overwhelming risks that existence might involve. It would be an entirely different matter if it were solely our own risk to take; if it were only our own opinion of life we were considering. The reason why begetting is such a tricky question is precisely that we are risking something, everything, on the life of another person. If this is not somehow a problem for us, then what is?”
― Mara Van Der Lugt, Begetting: What Does It Mean to Create a Child?

“There should never be a point in any moral discourse at which we blankly decide that a problem applies to others, but not to us.”
― Mara Van Der Lugt, Begetting: What Does It Mean to Create a Child?

“Hyper-organised societies, where the social control exercised by the government extends into more and more areas of people's lives, might become places in which voters do not have the fatalistic attitude towards winning and losing required by democracy. Too much may be at stake for the politicians as well because when their power is so extensive it becomes ever more painful to give it up.”
― David Runciman, The History of Ideas: Equality, Justice and Revolution

“Of course, she wasn't pleased that her sister-in-law and mother-in-law had a lot of free time to devote to her wedding.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“An effort, maybe, can sometimes give pleasure, provided it's not work. An idle effort can be useful and pleasant, but work, instead, is a useless thing, and destroys the imagination.”
― Elsa Morante, L'isola di Arturo

“Hope, at times, weakens awareness, like a defect.”
― Elsa Morante, L'isola di Arturo

“Apparently, there was meant to be beauty in cracks, cracks were how the light gets in but, more importantly, they were how the liquid gets out. No one really wants a leaky cup.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“The question she needed to ask: Is this someone I'd turn to in a crisis, someone whose memory or image I might summon up when they're not around? Someone I need? If they came to visit me on my deathbed, would I be pleased, or would I think, What are you doing here? It was a ghoulish criterion to apply on a casual date but this perfectly nice man didn't qualify, any more than she'd pass the deathbed test for him. One or two more people, that was all she really needed, one or two that shde could love.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“Liberals are always interested in money. They care about it and they care about what it brings, but they reserve the right to disdain that impulse in other people.”
― Andrew O'Hagan, Caledonian Road

“Swimming is like life – a couple of kids can ruin everything.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“But which of us knows how we'd really behave in a life or death situation? So why judge anyone? The facts of life are fairly brutal when you get right down to it. Everyone's plane is going down, and you can't really judge the people who are screaming.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“Every little snowflake is unique, but it's all just snow.”
― Frankie Boyle, Meantime

“an inheritocracy poses more of a moral quandary for a liberal than a conservative”
― Eliza Filby, Inheritocracy: It's Time to Talk About the Bank of Mum and Dad

“Eating meat has become morally problematic, at least for people who take the trouble to think about it.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“While the state describes itself as a Westminster-model democracy, scholars have assessed Singapore differently. The range of descriptions applied include authoritarian, semi-authoritarian, soft authoritarian, Asian democracy, semi-democracy, illiberal democracy, communitarian democracy, dictatorship, pseudo-democracy, limited democracy, mandatory democracy, despotic state, "decent, non-democratic state", and hegemonic electoral authoritarian. This plethora of descriptors embracing the poles of despotism and democracy, alongside multiple qualifiers, signals the complexity of Singapore as a regime type.”
― Jothie Rajah, Authoritarian Rule of Law: Legislation, Discourse and Legitimacy in Singapore

“It is a musical people can't help but talk about, both because it is good and because it is absolutely mad. Operation Mincemeat itself is a caper that doesn't quite seem real, and its retelling as a musical only heightens the baffling nature of the story.”
― Erin Edwards, Finding Hester: The Incredible Story Of The Hidden Woman Whose Love Letters Changed World War II In Operation Mincemeat

“Ewen Montagu is played by a woman because if he were played by a man, he would be so incredibly insufferable that the entire show would fall apart. His over-confident bravado in the hands of the women who have played him thus far instead comes across as charming, and a send-up of an entitled, public school alumni brand of patriarchy, rather than support of it.”
― Erin Edwards, Finding Hester: The Incredible Story Of The Hidden Woman Whose Love Letters Changed World War II In Operation Mincemeat

“He didn't think she would make a good lawyer. She was too guileless, too deferential. She lacked a certain calculating reserve.”
― Kate Greathead, The Book of George