Headlong Quotes

“Early spring, yes. It's one of those cautiously hopeful days at the beginning of April, after the clocks have made their great leap forward but before the weather or the more suspicious trees have quite had the courage to follow them, and Kate and I are traveling north in a car crammed with food and books and old saucepans and spare pieces of furniture.”
― Michael Frayn, Headlong

“Iconography, I could tell her, informs us that a worn sofa and a vehicle held together with twine represent poverty. Iconology teaches us that the plain iconography has to be read in conjunction with a wider conception of style and artistic intention—that its real meaning is the opposite of what it appears to be. Iconography, I might go on, tells us that the look she’s wearing on her face is one conventionally adopted to represent the expression of interest. Iconology, on the other hand, involves understanding that in this particular context, what this conventional expression of interest actually conveys is mockery.”
― Michael Frayn, Headlong: A Novel

“The season that my picture shows, it seems to me now, is the moral equinox, the uncertain days we live in, when light and dark in the world are equally balanced. Or perhaps, more accurately, the weeks just after it, at the start of the old New Year, when the long winter nights behind us are beginning to give place at last to the long summer days ahead. Outside the windows of the train, the northwestern suburbs, too, are full of sunshine, and everywhere there’s the same shimmer of green that’s spreading across the woods in the picture. There’s also a travailler here—me, coming down from the winter air in the high passes, heading for the soft lands of summer, where the ship’s waiting to weigh anchor and set sail for Jerusalem. And what a delight it is to have some great journey to undertake, some great enterprise under way, so that all one’s thoughts and efforts are guided by its onward momentum. Everything we do has bad as well as good in it, dark as well as light, and that includes the enterprise I’m embarked upon now. But the days are drawing out and the nights are drawing in, and I know that the good is going to predominate.”
― Michael Frayn, Headlong: A Novel

“Odd, though, all these dealings of mine with myself. First I’ve agreed a principle with myself, now I’m making out a case to myself, and debating my own feelings and intentions with myself. Who is this self, this phantom internal partner, with whom I’m entering into all these arrangements? (I ask myself.)”
― Michael Frayn, Headlong