Paradise Postponed Quotes

“She felt a tightness in her chest and sent for Dr Simcox.
'What's the trouble?'
'Look out there, that's the trouble! It's so green and quiet and it's always bloody raining.'
'That's England, Mrs Mallard-Greene. I'm afraid there's no known cure for it.”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“In the middle of the swinging sixties people in England were apparently under some sort of obligation to have a good time and most of them didn't. A Russian and an American walked about in space to no one's particular advantage. The Beatles received their British Empire medals and, so it was said, smoked cannabis in the lavatories at Buckingham Palace. American aeroplanes were bombing Vietnam, but no one seemed to talk about the nuclear holocaust any more.”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“What on earth was Henry talking about?'
'His soul. I wonder where he keeps it.”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“He's a cabinet minister and his mother was a cook. My father was a doctor and I'm a cook. Perhaps I passed him on the way down, or did he pass me on the way up?”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“Oh, you think everyone's interesting. That's because you're a Red. I don't. I believe that quite a lot of people were just manufactured when God was thinking of something else.”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“She believed that, in an ideal world, the working class would rule the country, but she had no particular desire to ask any of them to tea.”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“Take sex, for instance.'
'What do you want me to do with it?'
'Try to be serious for a moment. Take the sex life of our father.'
[...]
Even after a couple of brandies he felt extremely reluctant to discuss sex and his father. 'It's something I'd rather not think about,' he said. 'We all come into existence as a result of a momentary embrace by our parents which find impossible to imagine. [...] We all assume we're the result of our own particular immaculate conception.”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“You can't change people. You know that. You can't make them stop hating each other, or longing to blow up the world, not by walking through the rain and singing to a small guitar. Most you can do for them is pull them out of the womb, thump them on the backside and let them get on with it.”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“Alfie Dawlish. Invented all sorts of imaginary ailments for the family at the Manor so he could rob them and treat the village for nothing. It was his primitive version of the Health Service”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“A hundred pounds! He couldn't remember ever having seen a hundred pounds, all at one time. He found himself envying his father, who had nothing to worry about except the future of mankind.”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“The first sight of the Rapstone Valley is of something unexpectedly isolated and uninterruptedly rural; a solitary jogger is the only outward sign of urban pollution.”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“You know we all think, I certainly thought,’ Simeon told him, ‘that our lives are so different from our parents’. We think differently, feel differently, all that sort of thing. But it’s not true, is it? We all find out the same things, and when we’ve found them out, well, then it’s time to go.”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“that our lives are so different from our parents’. We think differently, feel differently, all that sort of thing. But it’s not true, is it? We all find out the same things, and when we’ve found them out, well, then it’s time to”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“So you admit the existence of a God who doesn’t like to be pestered?”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“I’ve got no time for blokes who sit in Kathmandu contemplating their navels and putting up with poverty and starvation, and the worst class system outside Bournemouth.”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“Look out there, that’s the trouble! It’s so green and quiet and it’s always bloody raining.’ ‘That’s England, Mrs Mallard-Greene. I’m afraid there’s no known cure for it.”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“Dieting: the only excuse for dieting is poverty.”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“When Fred asked Agnes’s father if that was why he had wanted to become a doctor he got a short answer. ‘Balls! I had no choice. I couldn’t pass the bloody exams to be a vet.”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“She’s young, you see. Young people alarm him now.”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“He’s a cabinet minister and his mother was a cook. My father was a doctor and I’m a cook. Perhaps I passed him on the way down, or did he pass me on the way up?”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“We all come into existence as a result of a momentary embrace by our parents which we find impossible to imagine.”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed