The Best of Adam Sharp Quotes

“Lost love belongs in a three-minute song, pullling back feelings from a time when they came unbidden, recalling the infatuation, the walking on sunshine that cannot last and the pain of its loss, whether through parting or the passage of time, reminding us that we are emotional beings”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“A few times in my life, I have been manipulated by the sexual power of a woman. "Could you help with my assignment?" I'll do it for you. "I don't know why they've given me middle seat." Take mine. "I thought the trains would still be running." Let me drive your home. No promises, no offers, nothing expected in return.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“In Hong Kong, I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera”, in which the hero must wait until his seventies before being united with his beloved. In a moment of Melancholy, I inscribed my copy: Angelina, I will love you always. Adam and sent it to her, via Jacinta. It was an unhealthy book for me to have read at that time, and to have then inflicted on Angelina. Just wait long enough and somehow the right people will die. The starts will align, we’ll get over ourselves and we’ll be together. And in the meantime, what?”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“The day might come when I had nothing but memories, and the choice of whether to indulge my romantic side and wallow in them, or my cynical side and reflect on the reliability.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“I remembered something Claire had told me from her sales training. Don’t buy it back. Once you’ve made your sale, stop selling, or you’ll risk the buyer getting pissed off and changing his or her mind. Don’t buy it back, she would say after I had persuaded her to go to the pub instead of the Masala Garden, and was then tempted to enumerate all the advantages of her wise decision. Still, I was not sure I had made the sale. I wanted to say something more anyway. For Angelina. “All the things you did, she saw through. She played her part in whatever game you set up because she wanted you to get through it. Including everything she did with me.” I knew the last bit was only partly true. Her I love you might not have happened without the marital crisis, but it had nothing to do with any games with Charlie. I could only assume Charlie didn’t know about that. He was nodding slowly. I had one more thing to say, a final bit of advice for the great negotiator. “There’s a saying we often quote in IT that insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result.” “Einstein.” “Attributed to. So maybe, if you want to keep your marriage, you’ll have to do something different instead of more of the same.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“And you haven’t forgiven him?” Because you can give up your career for your wife, buy her a ring every birthday, adopt her sister’s child, but screw one sheep”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“I didn’t want to go either, at that moment, with no thought of the consequences. But we had done the hard yards the previous day and I did not want to walk them again. This was hurting us both for no good purpose.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“I wanted to press her, confirm that there definitely was nothing to fear from an unattached man who had declared an interest in my attractive partner who was feeling unsupported at home, but we had apparently talked enough about me.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“That did not stop me chewing it over. And over. It was no single thing. It was my job, her job, my unwillingness to commit, her unwillingness to bury her marriage, my concerns about fatherhood.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“I had left it too late, not just through fear of making a wrong decision, but because I had not believed I was good enough for Angelina, a belief she had reinforced by not offering to wait for me. I wanted Angelina to prove her love by doing it my way. She wanted the same of me. But we had each doubted ourselves too much to do what the other needed.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“There is a famous Bob Dylan song in which the narrator’s lover hands him a book of poetry and he sees his own feelings reflected on the page. The gift-wrapped anthology that Angelina gave me was bookmarked at a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore Alone upon the threshold of my door Of individual life, I shall command The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand Serenely in the sunshine as before, Without the sense of that which I forbore, Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine With pulses that beat double … Her hand on my shoulder in the Victoria Parade bar, that first night, counting the beat. … What I do And what I dream include thee, as the wine Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue God for myself, He hears that name of thine, And sees within my eyes, the tears of two. I read it over and over while I waited for her and, as in the Dylan song, the words rang true. His lyrics did not include a summer evening and a crowded hill and a Sonnet from the Portuguese, but they would now be as much a part of it for me as if he had sung “Henceforth in Thy Shadow” instead of “Tangled Up in Blue.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“Angelina could do better than me. I was trying to keep my expectations in line with reality, which is to say I was trying not to fall in love with her. Or at least I was trying to deny that I had already done so.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“Shanksy helped himself to a drink. “Bloke walks into a bar, and he’s got this tiny head. He’s a pinhead. Barman says, ‘What happened?’ Bloke says, ‘This genie appeared, stark naked, long legs, big tits, and offered me a wish. I say, ‘How about a little head?’ and…” I laughed. I hadn’t heard it. Shanksy took a slug of his soda water. “So the moral is?” “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth?” He nodded. “And don’t get a big head.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“There was just that moment of admiration for the guy who had backed every horse in the Melbourne Cup to ensure his wife would win.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“Angelina loved those evenings, too, but she also wanted to do things: see and discuss a film or play, go to a wine tasting, hear a public lecture. Time with Angelina was precious and I did not want to spend too much of it listening to the Socialist Alliance debating the role of women in the Marxist utopia.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“Angelina was—had been—an addiction, and the only way to deal with an addiction is abstinence. Maybe. Time passes. Every alcoholic wants to prove they’re cured. Surely, after twenty years in a committed relationship, I could exchange an e-mail or two with my ex-lover, who had, as the Americans say, reached out. She might have a terminal illness and want to tie up the loose ends. I could blame the breakfast conversation with my mother for that thought. Perhaps she and Charlie just wanted advice on holiday options in Northern England: Looking for somewhere cold and miserable to get away from this interminable sunshine. What would it say about my relationship with Claire if I felt too vulnerable to respond to an innocuous query?”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“Angelina was—had been—an addiction, and the only way to deal with an addiction is abstinence.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“Tegenwoordig haalde ik meer herinneringen uit mijn geheugenbank dan ik erin stopte.
Ooit kwam misschien de dag dat ik niets anders meer had dan mijn herinneringen en moest kiezen of ik de overhand gaf aan mijn romantische kant en me erin zou onderdompelen, of aan mijn cynische kant en zou twijfelen aan hun betrouwbaarheid.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“Tegenwoordig haalde ik meer herinneringen uit mijn geheugenbank dan ik erin stopte.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“I’d been dubbed Seagull, after a joke that consultants fly in, do a lot of flapping and squawking, shit all over everybody, and fly out.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp

“These days I was taking more from my bank of memories than I was putting in.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp