The House of Sleep Quotes

“Objectivity is just male subjectivity.”
― Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep

“...quando perdi qualcuno e questo qualcuno ti manca, tu soffri perché la persona assente si è trasformata in un essere immaginario: irreale. Ma il tuo desiderio di lei non è immaginario. Così è a quello che devi aggrapparti: al desiderio. Perché è reale.”
― Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep

“Your gravity, your grace have turned a tide
In me, no lunar power can reverse;
But in your narcoleptic eyes I spied
A sightlessness tonight: or something worse,
A disregard that made me feel unmanned.
Meanwhile, insomniac, I catch my breath
To think I saw my future traced in sand
One afternoon "as still, as carved, as death,”
And pray for an oblivion so deep
It ends in transformation. Only dawn
Can save me, flood this haunted house of sleep
With light, and drown the thoughts that nightly warn:
Another lifetime is the least you’ll need, to trace
The guarded secrets of her gravity, her grace.”
― Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep

“There’s a fine line between forgetting an event, and suppressing the memory of it.”
― Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep

“Language is a traitor, a double agent who sleeps across borders without warning in the dead of night. It is a heavy snowfall in a foreign country, which hides the shapes and contours of reality beneath a cloak of nebulous whiteness. It is a crippled dog, never quite able to perform the tricks we ask of it. It is a ginger biscuit, dunked for too long in the tea of our expectations, crumbling and dissolving into nothingness. It is a lost continent.”
― Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep

“If ever I’m disheartened by failures such as these, I simply reflect on my humble beginnings and marvel at the enormous distance I have travelled since then.”
― Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep

“For the benefit of this naïf, the movie experts ran through an inventory of all the lost movies they could think of: the eight-hour version of Greed, Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried, about a clown who works in the Nazi concentration camps, the missing reels of The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles’s legendary The Other Side of the Wind, The Blockhouse – a Second World War drama starring Peter Sellers,”
― Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep

“This is great,’ said Terry. ‘This is so much better than sitting in my room watching Written on the Wind.”
― Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep

“Obsessions, of course, can never be shared.”
― Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep

“The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it...”
― Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep

“A disease, Terry - the most widespread and life-curtailing disease of all! Forget cancer, forget multiple sclerosis, forget AIDS. If you spend eight hours a day in bed, then sleep is shortening your life by a third! That's the equivalent of dying at the age of fifty - and it's happening to all of us. This is more than just a disease: this is a plague! And none of us is immune, you realize.”
― Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep

“This is the crazed, manic energy of the bull at the end of the fight, fatally wounded but ploughing ahead, driven only by pain and anger and the mindless will to go on living.”
― Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep

“Don’t you know what a pussy is, sir?’

‘Of course he doesn’t. He hasn’t even seen Basic Instinct.”
― Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep

“If there was one kind of hat Terry despised above all others, it was the baseball cap. There was nothing wrong with children wearing it, of course, but whenever he saw it on the head of an adult it seemed to symbolize everything that he most hated about America, even more potently than the figure of Mickey Mouse or the latest Coke adverts or the hordes of giant yellow ‘M’s which were even now beginning to advance across Britain like an unchecked virus. And even worse, Kingsley was wearing it back to front. This, without doubt, was the ultimate badge of imbecility.”
― Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep