Mothering Sunday Quotes

“We are all fuel. We are born, and we burn, some of us more quickly than others. There are different kinds of combustion. But not to burn, never to catch fire at all, that would be the sad life, wouldn’t it?”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“So what was it then exactly, this truth-telling? ... It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive. It was about finding a language. And it was about being true to the fact, the one thing only followed from the other, that many things in life —of so many more than we think—can never be explained at all.”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“People read books, didn’t they, to get away from themselves, to escape the troubles of their lives?”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“This was the great truth of life, that fact and fiction were always merging, interchanging.”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“And books, she knew by then, were one of the necessities, the rocks of her life.”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive. It was about finding a language. And it was about being true to the fact, the one thing only followed from the other, that many things in life—oh so many more than we think—can never be explained at all.”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“And what if orphans really were called orchids? And if the sky was called the ground. And if a tree was called a daffodil. Would it make any difference to the actual nature of things? Or their mystery?”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“And she supposed—the furrowed face would bloom again—that it was a very common human predicament. To be at a loss, not to know what to do with yourself.”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“Could life be so cruel yet so bounteous at the same time?”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“What did writers do with their time? They were the most unadventurous souls on earth, weren’t they? Sitting all day at their desks.”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“Words were like an invisible skin, enwrapping the world and giving it reality. Yet you could not say the world would not be there, would not be real if you took away the words. At best it seemed that things might bless the words that distinguished them, and that words might bless everything.”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“was what, she sometimes thought, libraries were for: for men to disappear into and be important in, even though they had disappeared.”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“Once upon a time, before the boys were killed and when there were more horses than cars, before the male servants disappeared and they made do, at Upleigh and at Beechwood, with just a cook and a maid, the Sheringhams had owned not just four horses in their own stable, but what might be called a 'real horse', a racehorse, a thoroughbred. Its name was Fandango. It was stabled near Newbury. It had never won a damn thing. But is was the family's indulgence, their hope for fame and glory on the racecourses of southern England. The deal was that Pa and Ma - otherwise known in his strange language as 'the shower' - owned the head and body and he and Dick and Freddy had a leg each.
'What about the fourth leg?'
'Oh the fourth leg. That was always the question.”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“Well, they were steeped in experience now. He had never known anyone better, she was sure of it. Nor had she. It was in the look he gave her now. And in the stare she returned.
She found it difficult, even as she started, not to let tears come into her eyes, even as she knew that to allow them, use them, would have been somehow to fail. She must be brave, generous, merciless in allowing him this last possible gift of herself.
Would he ever forget her, lying there like that?”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“It tasted as beer had always tasted the few times she’d drunk it, like brown autumn leaves.”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“And, like a mother to herself, she would never forget that girl on a bicycle, though she would never mention her to anyone, never breathe a word.”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“Can a mirror keep a print? Can you look into a mirror and see someone else? Can you step through a mirror and be someone else?”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“A complete fiction! Yet something that was clearly and completely fiction could also contain—this was the nub and the mystery of the matter—truth.”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“Some things, some places perhaps take up their truer existence in the mind.”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“Kaip gali būti kažkuo, pirma nepabuvęs niekuo?”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“Le parole erano come una pelle invisibile, che avvolgeva il mondo rendendolo reale.”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“والكتب، كما أيقنت حينها, باتت من الضروريات, الصخور الممسكة بحياتها.”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“ما نحن إلا وقود. نولد ثم نُحرق, ويحترق بعضنا أسرع من البعض الآخر. هناك أنواع عدّة من الاشتعال. لكن ألّا تحترق, ألا تمسك النّار بأيّ طرف منك، فهذه هي الحياة الحزينة, أليست كذلك؟”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“Could she have done what she’d done today if she’d had a mother to go to? Could she have had the life she didn’t yet know she was going to have? Could her mother have known, making her dreadful choice, how she had blessed her?”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

“La gente non legge forse i libri per fuggire da se stessa, e per tenere lontani i guai che ne scandiscono l'esistenza?”
― Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday