A.A. Gill is Further Away Quotes

“I told them this was their language, this English, this most marvellous and expressive cloak of meaning and imagination. This great, exclamatory, illuminating song, it belonged to anyone who found it in their mouths. There was no wrong way to say it, or write it, the language couldn’t be compelled or herded, it couldn’t be tonsured or pruned, pollarded or plaited, it was as hard as oaths and as subtle as rhyme. It couldn’t be forced or bullied or policed by academics; it wasn’t owned by those with flat accents; nobody had the right to tell them how to use it or what to say. There are no rules and nobody speaks incorrectly, because there is no correctly: no high court of syntax. And while everyone can speak with the language, nobody speaks for the language. Not grammars, not dictionaries. They just run along behind, picking up discarded usages. This English doesn’t belong to examiners or teachers. All of you already own the greatest gift, the highest degree this country can bestow. It’s on the tip of your tongue.”
― A.A. Gill, A.A. Gill is Further Away: Helping with Enquiries

“There is no tragedy so utter that a Belgian, with the best will in the world, can’t make worse.”
― A.A. Gill, A.A. Gill is Further Away: Helping with Enquiries

“Ronald Reagan was a man who knew the diplomatic form. He also had a showman’s ear for a tune. So when, at an official dinner, the marine band slipped into ‘Edelweiss’, he stopped mid-anecdote, rose to his feet, placed a reverential hand over his heart and stared into the blank mid-distance out of respect for the Austrian national anthem.”
― A.A. Gill, A.A. Gill is Further Away: Helping with Enquiries

“The Gulf is the proof of Carnegie’s warning about wealth: ‘There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.”
― A.A. Gill, A.A. Gill is Further Away: Helping with Enquiries

“Trojan is giving away Magnum large condoms (do you think they were named after a large wooden animal inside which thousands of little men were hiding, ready to jump out and ruin your life?)”
― A.A. Gill, A.A. Gill is Further Away: Helping with Enquiries

“Nobody knows exactly where the first chickens were domesticated – India, China, Thailand, Vietnam – somewhere around 10,000 years ago, which is to say at the birth of farming. The wild bird is a red jungle fowl, Gallus gallus (the French made it their national bird because of the similarity to Gaul, and because they still behave like chickens).”
― A.A. Gill, A.A. Gill is Further Away: Helping with Enquiries

“Down a winding cobbled street from the church trips the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, the most evocative and strangely dramatic of all morris dances, performed for perhaps hundreds of years, conceivably for thousands. They are led by a single fiddler, dressed in a rag coat, playing a tune that is childlike and simple, but also full of sadness and an ethereal, mordant power, like the soundtrack of a dream. Behind him come men carrying antlered fallow deer heads in front of their faces. Behind them, a man-woman, a hunter and a hobbyhorse. They dance in silence, slowly. The hunt turns and turns, casting patterns in the moonlight. You feel its mossy, shadowed meaning beyond understanding. A ghost dance, a silently keening sadness. The things we misplace always bear a heavier loss than the things we choose to grasp with white knuckles. And in the darkness, quite unexpectedly, I feel tears of mourning on my cheek.”
― A.A. Gill, A.A. Gill is Further Away: Helping with Enquiries