Glittering Images Quotes

“Think of me as the porter . . . and consider the possiblity that life might be less exhausting if you unloaded some of your bags on to my empty trolley.”
― Susan Howatch, Glittering Images

“I was wondering if the scene in the drawing-room had been a triumph or a disaster or merely a chaotic piece of bad taste verging on bathos, but I reflected that the only important question was whether I had communicated my message to my parents. I continued to smoke my cigarette and occasionally I shuddered. I wondered dimly how anyone ever survived their families.”
― Susan Howatch, Glittering Images

“It’s dangerous to make a judgement when one can’t know all the facts,” pursued Darrow, “and since only God can know all the facts, one can only conclude that it’s best to leave the judgements to God.”
― Susan Howatch, Glittering Images

“Everything’s absolutely fine really—except that sometimes I think I can’t go on any more”
― Susan Howatch, Glittering Images

“But then I looked in the glass and saw the spy beyond the clergyman, the image beyond the image, and beyond the spy was yet another man, the image beyond the image beyond the image. Reality blurred; fantasy and truth became inextricably intertwined. I told myself I had imagined the distant stranger but as I felt my personality begin to divide I covered my face with my hands.”
― Susan Howatch, Glittering Images

“Parenthood only ends with the grave.”
― Susan Howatch, Glittering Images

“Friendship, however begun, is a voyage of discovery, full of perils and surprizes. (quoting Letters of Herbert Hensley Henson).”
― Susan Howatch, Glittering Images

“I thought you might want to try me out.”

“What for? We hardly need premarital sex to tell us that at first the physical side of marriage is going to be difficult! What matters is not that we confirm this obvious fact before marriage but that after the wedding we’re prepared to try hard to overcome the problem.”
― Susan Howatch, Glittering Images

“I must say, he sounds on very familiar terms with God, but then one never quite knows with laymen whether that indicates arrogance, reverence or ignorance.”
― Susan Howatch, Glittering Images

“I think you’d agree that as far as marriage is concerned, there are two types of churchmen. One set feels that marriage distracts them from serving God as well as they can, and the other set feels that as single men they can’t serve God properly because they’re continually distracted by loneliness and by wondering (as the naval ratings would say) where the next fuck was coming from.”
― Susan Howatch, Glittering Images

“In my opinion Christ had been a good Jew, not “liberal” in the modern sense of extending a credo to its outer limits in the name of freedom, but “radical” in the original sense of cutting back the credo to its roots to rediscover its true spirit.”
― Susan Howatch, Glittering Images

“Herbert’s Bill has two main purposes: one is to relieve suffering—and do you suppose that Christ, with all his compassion, would have objected to that?—and the second is to reinforce the sanctity of marriage by permitting the dissolution of the marital travesties, the cases where the spiritual core of the marriage has been destroyed not just by adultery but by cruelty, desertion or insanity as well—and do you suppose that Our Lord, who recoiled from the debasement of marriage, would have objected to the elimination of the marriages which had become a mockery? I think not.”
― Susan Howatch, Glittering Images