Towards the End of the Morning Quotes

“Tessa liked her, in a dreary sort of way – the sort of way one liked picking one’s nails or staying in bed all morning.”
― Michael Frayn, Towards the End of the Morning

“It didn’t matter if you made a fool of yourself in front of strangers – he saw that now. It probably didn’t matter much if you did it in front of your friends. The shameful thing was doing it in front of strangers, and being seen by your friends in the process.”
― Michael Frayn, Towards the End of the Morning

“Isn’t it rather terrible that what brings the pricking behind my eyelids is not old Eddy’s death, or even the thought of human mortality in general, but certain strokes of rhetoric – certain alliterations, repetitions, and verbal sonorities which don’t hold any literal meaning for me? I’m more moved by literature than by what it describes!”
― Michael Frayn, Towards the End of the Morning

“Failure, it occurred to him, was the secular equivalent of sin. Modern secular man was born into a world whose moral framework was composed not of laws and duties, but of tests and comparisons. There were no absolute outside standards, so standards had to generate themselves from within, relativistically. One's natural sense of inadequacy could be kept at bay only pious acts of repeated successfulness. And failure was more terrifying than sin. Sin could be repented of by an act of volition; failure could not be disposed of so easily.”
― Michael Frayn, Towards the End of the Morning