What a Carve Up! Quotes

“The upshot was that she lost her religion - with a vengeance - and walked out on him, taking these three daughters with her. Faith, Hope and Brenda.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“[...] because there comes a point where greed and madness can no longer be told apart. This dividing line is very thin, just like a belt of film surrounding the earth's sphere. It's a delicate blue, and this transition from the blue to the black is very gradual and lovely.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“What did she die of?
The same thing that gets everybody in the end: a combination of circumstances,”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“Well, he and his wife had both been devout evangelicals for a while. They had these two kids and then she had an incredible job giving birth to the next one. The upshot was that she lost her religion - with a vengeance - and walked out on him, taking these three daughters with her. Faith, Hope and Brenda.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“Well, there'll be an outcry, of course, but then it'll die down and something else will come along for people to get annoyed about. The important thing is that we save ourselves a lot of money, and meanwhile a whole generation of children from working-class or low-income families will be eating nothing but crisps and chocolate every day. Which means, in the end, that they'll grow up physically weaker and mentally slower.' Dorothy raised an eyebrow at this assertion. 'Oh, yes,' he assured her. 'A diet high in sugars lead to retarded brain growth. Our chaps have proved it.' He smiled. 'As every general knows, the secret of winning any war is to demoralize the enemy'.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“If you sleep, if you dream, you must accept your dreams. It’s the role of the dreamer.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“it’s their own unplanned words, their own thoughtless gestures and inflections, which have clung to my memory like flies caught on flypaper.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“And so they sit at home, getting fat on the proceedings and here we all are. Our businesses are failing, our jobs disappearing, our countryside choking, our hospitals crumbling, our homes being repossessed, our bodies being poisoned, our minds shutting down, the whole bloody spirit of the country crushed and fighting for breath. I hate the Winshaws, Fiona. Just look what they've done to us. Look what they've done to you.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“For with every snatched glance (I was trying to keep my eyes on the road) I felt that I was
being offered a glimpse of something new and unthinkable, something that I had been needlessly denying myself, now, for many years: a future.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“… Did they have the same worries that I had, these absurd people? Did they have the sort of feelings I would even understand? It wasn’t enough to say that they came from a different walk of life. It was more extreme, more final than that: they belonged to a different genre of existence altogether. One which actually horrified me …”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“Do you work out, Michael? Attend a gym, or anything like that?’
‘No. Why do you ask?’
‘It’s just that you have unusually firm buttocks. For a writer, that is. It was the first thing I noticed about you.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“There was this sort of – empty space, inside me, where I used to paint, and I was looking for something to fill it: someone, I should
say, because I was longing just to find a picture – any picture – which would leap out at me and suddenly … connect. Do you know that feeling? You must do: coming across an artist whose work speaks to you so directly, it’s as if you both understand the same private language – somehow confirming everything you’ve ever thought and at the same time saying something completely new.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“I live and breathe art”,’ said Phoebe. ‘ “What other people refer to as ‘the real world’ has always seemed pale and insipid by comparison”.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“Take that bike ride I went on the other week. Agony, it was. Complete bloody agony. But at least I met some people, went for a drink
afterwards, got a couple of dinner invitations out of it. It may not sound like very much, but after a while you realize … there’s nothing worse than being on your own. Nothing.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“You’re hiding from the world because it frightens you. I frighten you.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“Nobody gives a tinker’s fuck about fiction any more, not real fiction, and the only kind of … values anybody seems to care about are the
ones that can be added up on a balance sheet.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“Hilary’s reputation had preceded her, and she found that on her first day she did not receive much of a welcome from her new colleagues. Well, she thought: fuck them. She was only going to be coming in one or two days a
week. If that.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“Mr Gardner remarked at this point that he would have thought twice about accepting this job if he had known that he was joining a sinking ship, and asked whose idea it had been to employ this bloody woman in the first
place.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“Sometimes there can be more to life than making a profit, Dorothy.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“You shouldn’t take notice of anything that Henry tells you, you know,’ he now says, with a chilly smile. ‘After all, he is a politician.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“In this regard it had already been noticed by several members of her family that her attitude towards the male sex was characterized at best by indifference and at worst by aversion: the lack of interest with which she received the approaches of her occasional suitors was matched only by her passionate attachment and devotion to Godfrey – who was, as the few reports and surviving photographs testify, by far the gayest, most handsome, most dynamic and generally prepossessing of the
five brothers and sisters.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“It quite spoiled my war.'
'You say that almost as if you'd been enjoying it,' said Michael.
'But of course I was enjoying it,' said Tabitha, smiling. 'We all were. It's so hard for you young people to understand, I know, but there's nothing like a good war for pulling a country together. Everyone was so nice to each other, for a while. Everything that had divided us suddenly seemed so petty and inconsequential.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“If imagination's the lifeblood of the people and thought is our oxygen, then his job's to cut off our circulation and hers is to make sure that we all stay dead from the neck up.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“Like Hilary (who never watched her own television programmes), Dorothy had no intention of ever consuming the products which she was happy to foist upon an uncomplaining public.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“It's a reminder that what is inevitable may also be spiritually unendurable, that what is justifiable may be atrocious . . . that, like our Mad Mother Nature, our Mad Father Society is an organization of deaths as well as of lives . . .”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“We've got to squash this dewy-eyed belief that people can be motivated by anything other than money.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“. . . as a businessman, he thought the idea of having a centralized Health Service made a lot of sense, because ultimately it could be run as a business, with shareholders and a board of directors, and a chief executive, and that was the way to make sure it was efficient, to run it along business lines, i.e. with a view to making a profit. . . . in fact the Health Service, if properly managed, could turn out to be the most profitable business of all time, because health care was like prostitution, it was something for which the demand could never dry up; it was inexhaustible. He said that if someone could get himself appointed manager of a privatized Health Service, he would soon be just about the richest and most powerful man in the country.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“This book is full of passion. Full of anger, anyway. If it communicates anything at all, it's how much I hate these people, how
evil they are, how much they've spoiled everything, with their vested interests and their influence and their privilege and their stranglehold on all the centres of power; how they've got us all cornered, how they've pretty well carved up the whole bloody country between them.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“Interesting little phrase though, isn't it though "open" marriage? Makes it sound like a drain, or a sewer.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“Το κόλπο είναι να κάνεις πάντα σκανδαλώδη πράγματα. Δεν υπάρχει λόγος να περνάς μια σκανδαλώδη νομοθεσία και μετά να δίνεις στους άλλους το χρόνο να προετοιμαστούν σχετικά. Πρέπει να παρεμβαίνεις αμέσως και να την επικαλύπτεις με κάτι ακόμα χειρότερο, προτού η κοινή γνώμη προλάβει να καταλάβει το κακό που τη βρήκε.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!