Last Orders Quotes

“What job do you want to do?
And I see them all hanging up before me, like clothes on a rack, all the jobs, tinker, tailor, soldier, and you have to pick one and then you have to pretend for the rest of your life that that's what you are. So they aint no different really from accidents of birth. I didn't know that phrase then but I learnt it later. It's a good phrase...”
― Graham Swift, Last Orders

“It makes you feel sort of cheap and titchy. Like it's looking down at you, saying, I'm Canterbury Cathedral, who the hell are you?”
― Graham Swift, Last Orders

“It was like a voyage, only the other way round. So that instead of the waiting and hoping to sight land, you were moving over land in the first place, all impatient, all ready for that first glimpse. The seaside. The sea.”
― Graham Swift, Last Orders

“It was a horse-world, that’s what it was. When I think of him sitting beside me up there on the cart I don’t think of scrap metal, brass, copper, lead, cast-iron. I think of Duke. I think of the life of carters and pedlars. I see him lean forward, elbows on knees, after I’ve taken up the reins, and start to look around him as if he hadn’t noticed the world passing by. I see him scratch his neck and reset his cap. I see him light up a snout, dicky chest or no dicky chest, and breathe out the first drag, bottom lip jutting, then rub his chin with the tip of his thumb, cigarette between his fingers, then run the ball of his thumb across his forehead, and I know I do all those things, without helping it, the same gestures, the same motions.”
― Graham Swift, Last Orders

“When something's one thing, it's not another.”
― Graham Swift, Last Orders

“We walk on, spread out, but as if it's the weather that's forcing us apart, it's not our choosing, as if each of us is fighting his own little fight with the elements.”
― Graham Swift, Last Orders

“You can't make a real thing out of pretending hard.”
― Graham Swift, Last Orders

“It makes you feel sort of cheap and titchy. Like it's looking down at you, saying, I'm Canterbury Cathedral, who the hell are you?

Last Orders”
― Graham Swift, Last Orders