Waterland Quotes

“Children, be curious. Nothing is worse (I know it) than when curiosity stops. Nothing is more repressive than the repression of curiosity. Curiosity begets love. It weds us to the world. It's part of our perverse, madcap love for this impossible planet we inhabit. People die when curiosity goes. People have to find out, people have to know.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“That's the way it is: life includes a lot of empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue, nine-tenths water; life is one-tenth Here and Now, nine-tenths a history lesson. For most of the time the Here and Now is neither now nor here.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“Why is it that every so often history demands a bloodbath, a holocaust, an Armageddon? And why is it that every time the time before has taught us nothing?”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings?”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“What is a history teacher? He's someone who teaches mistakes.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“What does education do, what does it have to offer, when deprived of its necessary partner, the future, and face instead with - no future at all?”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress, it doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-endingly retrieving what is lost. A dogged, vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“There are no compasses for journeying in time.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man – let me offer you a definition – is the story-telling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories, he has to keep on making them up. As long as there’s a story, it’s all right. Even in his last moments, it’s said, in the split second of a fatal fall – or when he’s about to drown – he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“And there's no saying what heady potions we won't concoct, what meanings, myths, manias we won't imbibe in order to convince ourselves that reality is not an empty vessel.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“Why are the Fens flat? So God has a clear view...”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“But I have not brought history with me this evening (history is a thin garment, easily punctured by a knife blade called Now). I have brought my fear.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“And what does this question Why imply? It implies (...) dissatisfaction, disquiet, a sense that all is not well. In a state of perfect contentment there would be no need or room for this irritant little word. History begins only at the point where things go wrong; history is born only with trouble, with perplexity, with regret. So that hard on the heels of the word Why comes the sly and wistful word If. If it had not been for … If only … Were it not … Those useless Ifs of history.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“Ah, children, pity level-crossing keepers, pity lock-keepers – pity lighthouse-keepers – pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers), caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon…”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“I taught you that there is never any end to that question, because, as I once defined it for you (yes, I confess a weakness for improvised definitions), history is that impossible thing: the attempt to give an account with incomplete knowledge, of actions themselves undertaken with incomplete knowledge.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“Reality's not strange, not unexpected.Reality doesn't reside in the hallucination of events. Reality is uneventfulness, vacancy, flatness. Reality is that nothing happens.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“And so long as we have this itch for explanations, must we not always carry round with us this cumbersome but precious bag of clues called History? Another definition: Man, the animal which demands an explanation, the animal which asks Why.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“Nothing is more repressive than the repression of curiosity. Curiosity begets love. It weds us to the world. It’s part of our perverse, madcap love for this impossible planet we inhabit. People die when curiosity goes. People have to find out, people have to”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“Predvsem pa imajo ljudje potrebo po razlagi, kadar stvaritečejo narobe, kajne, ne pa, kadar tečejo dobro. Bolj ko te torej pitajo z razlagami, bolj se ti zdi, da so stvari v presneto slabem stanju, če potrebujejo toliko razlag.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“Razlaga je način, kako se izogniti dejstvom, medtem ko se pretvarjamo, da smo se jim približali.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“Učil sem vas, da se z neutrudnim iskanjem pojasnil ne dokopljemo do pojasnila vseh pojasnil, temveč do spoznanja, da je naša zmožnost razlage omejena.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“history is that impossible thing: the attempt to give an account, with incomplete knowledge, of actions themselves undertaken with incomplete knowledge. So that it teaches us no shortcuts to Salvation, no recipe for a New World, only the dogged and patient art of making do.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“Così come noi siamo fatti per un decimo di tessuti viventi e per nove decimi di acqua, così la vita è per un decimo Qui e Ora, e per nove decimi è una lezione di storia. Per la maggior parte del tempo, il Qui e Ora non è nè qui nè ora.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“...per ogni protagonista comparso per una volta sul cosiddetto palcoscenico della storia, sono stati migliaia, milioni coloro che non sono mai entrati nel teatro, che non hanno mai saputo che lo spettacolo si stava svolgendo, che hanno continuato l'ingrato lavoro di far fronte alla realtà.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“L'insegnamento è l'antagonismo tra insegnante e studente. E' quello che viene prodotto dalla perseveranza dell'uno e la resistenza dell'altro. E' una lunga e dura lotta contro una resistenza naturale,”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“For what is water, which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or colour of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing? And what are the Fens, which so imitate in their levelness the natural disposition of water, but a landscape which, of all landscapes, most approximates to Nothing?”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“How can there be any true revolution till we know what we're made of?”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“I taught you that by forever attempting to explain we may come, not to an Explanation, but to a knowledge of the limits of our power to explain.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland