House of Meetings Quotes

“Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“When a man conclusively exalts one woman, and one woman only, “above all others,” you can be pretty sure you are dealing with a misogynist. It frees him up for thinking the rest are shit.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“For both of us, I think, it had to do with our weakened power to love. It is strange that enslavement should have that effect – not just the fantastic degradation, not just the fear and the boredom and all the rest, but also the layered injustice, the silent injustice. So all right. We’re back where we started. To you, nothing – from you, everything. They took it from me, it seems, for no reason, other than that I value it so much.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“When I opened the door to her I felt like a child who believes itself lost on a swarming street and suddenly sees that all-solving outline, that indispensable displacement of air.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“There is a Western phenomenon called the male midlife crisis. Very often it is heralded by divorce. What history might have done to you, you bring about on purpose: separation from woman and child. Don’t tell me that such men aren’t tasting the ancient flavors of death and defeat.

In America, with divorce achieved, the midlifer can expect to be more recreational, more discretionary. He can almost design the sort of crisis he is going to have: motorbike, teenage girlfriend, vegetarianism, jogging, sports car, mature boyfriend, cocaine, crash diet, powerboat, new baby, religion, hair transplant.

Over here, now, there’s no angling around for your male midlife crisis. It is brought to you and it is always the same thing. It is death.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“In freedom, every non-nomenklatura citizen knew perpetual hunger – the involuntary slurp and gulp of the esophagus. In camp, your hunger kicked as I imagine a fetus would kick. It was the same with boredom. And boredom, by now, has lost all its associations with mere lassitude and vapidity. Boredom is no longer the absence of emotion; it is itself an emotion, and a violent one. A silent tantrum of boredom.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“Twenty-two poems covered the period from Lev’s first serious efforts to his arrest in 1948 at the age of nineteen. Very Mandelstamian, I adjudged: well-made, and studiously conversational, and coming close, here and there, to the images that really hurt and connect.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“Venus, I’m sorry that you’ve gone on minding that I didn’t let you drive me to O’Hare. “That’s what we do,” you said: “We drive each other to and from the airport.” Do you realize how rare that is? No one does it anymore, not even newlyweds. All right – it was selfish of me to decline. I said it was because I didn’t want to say goodbye to you in a public place. But I think it was the asymmetry of it that was really troubling me. You and I, we drive each other to and from the airport. And I didn’t want a to when I knew there wouldn’t be a from.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“[Describing the soap in the gulag] It smelt as if some sacred physical law had been demeaned in its creation.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“Rust is the failure of the work of man. The project, the venture, the experiment: failed, given up on, and not cleaned up after.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“Oppression lays down blood-lust. It lays it down like a wine.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“In the Gulag, it was not the case that people died like flies. Rather, flies died like people.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“Once, as he inhaled with his customary vehemence, I had a thought that made my armpits come alive.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“In the last months of the war, when I raped in uniform – we were, by then, so full of death (and the destruction of everything we had and knew) that the act of love, even in travesty, felt like a spell against the riot of murder.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“I’m sitting in the prow-shaped dining room of a tourist steamer, the Georgi Zhukov, on the Yenisei River, which flows from the foothills of Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean, thus cleaving the northern Eurasian plain – a distance of some two and a half thousand versts. Given Russian distances, and the general arduousness of Russian life, you’d expect a verst to be the equivalent of – I don’t know – thirty-nine miles. In fact it’s barely more than a kilometer.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“Sexual doubt—the exclusively male burden. Tell me, my dear: what is it there for? The utilitarian answer, I suppose, would be that it’s meant to stop us from reproducing if we’re weak and sickly or just too old.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“Women can die gently -.. -. Men always die in torment. Why? Towards the end, men break the habit of a lifetime, and start blaming themselves, with full male severity. Women break a habit too, and start blaming themselves no longer. They forgive.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings