Diana Athill Quotes

I am not sure that digging in our past guilts is a useful occupation for the very old, given that one can do so little about them. I have reached a stage at which one hopes to be forgiven for concentrating on how to get through the present.

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious." [Ten rules for writing fiction, The Guardian, 20 February 2010 (with Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, and AL Kennedy)]

An important aspect of the ebbing of sex was that other things became interesting. Sex obliterates the individuality of young women more often than it does that of young men, because so much more of a woman than a man is used by sex.

To me it was plain silly. It is so obvious that life works in terms of species rather than individuals. The individual just has to be born, to develop to the point at which it can procreate, and then to fall away into death to make way for its successors, and humans are no exception whatever they may fancy.

Generally office and home were far apart, and home was much more important than office. I was not ashamed of valuing my private life more highly than my work; that, to my mind, is what everyone ought to do.

We must always remember that we are only midwives—if we want praise for progeny we must give birth to our own.

My two valuable lessons are: avoid romanticism and abhor possessiveness.

Look! Why want anything more marvellous than what is.

All through my sixties I felt I was still within hailing distance of middle age, not safe on its shores, perhaps, but navigating its coastal waters. My seventieth birthday failed to change this because I managed scarcely to notice it, but my seventy-first did change it. Being 'over seventy' is being old: suddenly I was aground on that fact and saw that the time had come to size it up.

She was an object lesson on the essential luck, whatever hardships may come their way, of those born able to make things.

Dwindling energy is one of the most boring things about being old. From time to time you get a day when it seems to be restored, and you can't help feeling that you are 'back to normal', but it never lasts. You just have to resign yourself to doing less--or rather, taking more breaks than you used to in whatever you are doing. In my case I fear that what I most often do less of is my duty towards my companion rather than indulgence of my private inclinations.

Looking at things is never time wasted. If your children want to stand and stare, let them. When I was marvelling at the beauty of a painting or enjoying a great view it did not occur to me that the experience, however intense, would be of value many years later. But there it has remained, tucked away in hidden bits of my mind and now it comes, shouldering aside even the most passionate love affairs.

How, then, does the written word work? What part of a reader absorbs it - or should that be a double question: what part of a reader absorbs what part of a text? I think that underneath, or alongside, a reader's conscious response to a text, whatever is needy in him is taking in whatever the text offers to assuage that need.

You don't always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they'd be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it's the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.

I have heard people bewailing man's landing on the moon, as though before it was touched by an astronaut's foot it was made of silver or mother-of-pearl, and that footprint turned it into gray dust. But the moon never was made of mother-of-pearl, and it still shines as if it were so made.

Rock bottom is solid, so that you can rest on it, which is not agreeable but is a relief after years of treading water.

It was like removing layers of crumpled brown paper from an awkwardly shaped parcel, and revealing the attractive present which it contained.

They brought home to me the central reason why books have meant so much to me. It is not because of my pleasure in the art of writing, though that has been very great. It is because they have taken me so far beyond the narrow limits of my own experience and have so greatly enlarged my sense of the complexity of life: of its consuming darkness, and also – thank God – of the light which continues to struggle through.

The writing took so long, in part, because Rhys was a perfectionist who reworked the novel over and over until it met her exacting standards—and also because she was spectacularly inept at managing her day-to-day life and was almost continually derailed from the project. As one of her editors, Diana Athill, wrote, “Her inability to cope with life’s practicalities went beyond anything I ever saw in anyone generally taken to be sane.

it is that a lot of little black marks on paper can bring a person who died nearly two hundred years ago into your room: bring him so close that you know him much better than you would have known him if you met him in the flesh. It is extraordinary and it is enlarging.

If we are lucky enough, as I am, to be from time to time in quite close contact with young people, they can sometimes make it easier to hang on to this notion when they function, as every person does vis-a-vis every other person they come up against, as a mirror. Always we are being reflected in the eyes of others. Are we silly or sensible, stupid or clever, bad or good, unattractive or sexy...? We never stop being at least slightly aware of, if not actively searching for, answers to such questions, and are either deflated or elated, in extreme cases ruined or saved, by what we get. So if when you are old a beloved child happens to look at you as if he or she thinks (even if mistakenly!) that you are wise and kind: what a blessing! It's not that such a fleeting glimpse of yourself can convert you into wiseness and kindness in any enduring way; more like a good session of reflexology which, although it can cure nothing, does make you feel like a better person while it's going on and for an hour or two afterwards, and even that is well worth having. The more frequent such shots of self-esteem are, the more valuable they become, so there is a risk - remote, but possible - of their becoming addictive. An old person who doesn't enjoy having young people in her life must be a curmudgeon, but it is extremely important that she should remember that risk and watch her step. Or he, his.

It marked a turning point for me. It marked the point where I recognized that I must never - not even when he was 'well' again - expect from Didi what one normally expects from a friend. When he gave anything to other people - as he often did, as he had done earlier to me and was to do again - it was by the happy accident of their chancing to appreciate what he chanced to be 'giving off'. If he happened to be in a mood to charm, to find things amusing, to respond lovingly, to use his intuition (which could be sharp) on people's behaviour, to apply his intelligence, then whoever was around would benefit; but he was so hermetically walled up in himself that he was unablee to discover inother people any constant reason to attend to them, still less to be considerate of them, and he couldn't answer their demands.

What brought us to heel morally far more effectively than talk of Right and Wrong was the word that had such remarkable potency in our family: silly. It was the word most often used by grown-ups when they were scolding, and it worked so well because while "naughty" or "bad" added drama to a situation, and even hinted at forces which might be beyond your control, "silly" was something you could easily be (very likely had been, in whatever was the case in point); and silliness was, or you felt it ought to be, within your control. It was a maddening, snubbing little word, and you often raged against it, but in the end it contributed a great deal to giving us the idea that people are responsible for their own actions, and ought to be prepared to accept their consequences. Far more than God, up there in His marvellous world of all-embracing love, and of magic, it belonged to the world we understood.

and as for toddlers, I didn’t go so far as to blame them for being what they were, but I did feel that they were tedious to have around except in very small doses.

Something that her love had made would still be alive.

It is not entirely impossible that I might, like my mother, come to the end of my days murmuring, about some random memory: "It was absolutely divine.

The sentence I most sympathized with is 'Whatever hangups this indicated, I'd preferred men who seemed perfectly ordinary' - my sentiments, precisely, about life in general which I don't like to see pushed to fanciful extremes because it's good enough as it is.

The trouble with life is that incidents so often merely follow each other rather than grow out of each other ...

For 78 years, four months and three weeks I've been meaning to overcome this fatal habit of postponing the boring by quickly doing something nice instead -- oh dear!

was living in London, still by great good luck working, sharing a flat with an old friend who had barely enough money to cover his keep, while I had never earned enough to save a penny. Nothing would have made my mother confess that she longed to have me at home with her in Norfolk, but I knew that she did, and I believed that if you are the child of a loving, reliable and generously undemanding woman you owe her this consolation in her last years. I think that for people to look after their children when they are young, and to be looked after by them when they are old, is the natural order of events–although stupid or perverse parents can dislocate it. My mother was not stupid or perverse.

All artists have a private sanity which does not seem to me to be neurotic: they are the people to whom truth is important, and who can see things.

Drawings are what artists, great or small, do when they are working their way towards understanding something, or catching something they want to preserve: they communicate with such immediacy that they can abolish time.

Always we are being reflected in the eyes of others. Are we silly or sensible, stupid or clever, bad or good, unattractive or sexy…? We never stop being at least slightly aware of, if not actively searching for, answers to such questions, and are either deflated or elated, in extreme cases ruined or saved, by what we get. So if when you are old a beloved child happens to look at you as if he or she thinks (even if mistakenly!) that you are wise and kind: what a blessing! It’s not that such a fleeting glimpse of yourself can convert you into wiseness and kindness in any enduring way; more like a good session of reflexology which, although it can cure nothing, does make you feel like a better person while it’s going on and for an hour or two afterwards, and even that is well worth having.

HOW SUCCESSFULLY ONE manages to get through the present depends a good deal more on luck than it does on one’s own efforts. If one has no money, ill health, a mind never sharpened by an interesting education or absorbing work, a childhood warped by cruel or inept parents, a sex life that betrayed one into disastrous relationships…If one has any one, or some, or all of those disadvantages, or any one, or some, or all of others that I can’t bear to envisage, then whatever is said about old age by a luckier person such as I am is likely to be meaningless, or even offensive. I can speak only for, and to, the lucky. But there are more of them than one at first supposes, because the kind of fortune one enjoys, or suffers, does not come only from outside oneself. Of course much of it can be inflicted or bestowed on one by others, or by things such as a virus, or climate, or war, or economic recession; but much of it is built into one genetically, and the greatest good luck of all is built-in resilience.

do still sometimes amuse myself by trying to draw, and wish I had the energy to do so more often because it remains an absorbing occupation. And however far from being an artist my feeble attempts have left me, I am grateful to those classes for one positive result: I am now much better at seeing things than I used to be. That is something often said by people who have tried to draw, and it is a good reason for making the attempt, even in old age, because it adds such a generous pinch of pleasure to one’s days.

As children we loved the roses, watched eagerly for the first snowdrops, stroked the velvet of pansy petals, had our other favourite flowers, but the garden was not simply a place to be looked at. We inhabited it: climbed its trees, hid in its bushes, fished tadpoles and newts from its stream, stole its peaches and grapes (which was a sin and therefore more exciting that eating its plums and apples from the branch, which was allowed). And we were given regular tasks such as picking the sweet-peas for Gran and the strawberries and raspberries which were to come to the table that day. Towards the end of each season such tasks became a bit of a chore, but they were never disagreeable, and because they always involved delicious tastes and smells and pleasant leafy sensations, a garden was naturally accepted as a source of sensuous pleasure as well as a place full of beauty.

I have nephews, nieces, great-nephews and great-nieces, all of whom make nonsense of gloomy forebodings about modern youth–but they are the two I see most often, so it is they who seem to symbolize my good fortune in this respect. What is so good about it is not just the affection young people inspire and how interesting their lives are to watch. They also, just by being there, provide a useful counteraction to a disagreeable element in an old person’s life. We tend to become convinced that everything is getting worse simply because within our own boundaries things are doing so. We are becoming less able to do things we would like to do, can hear less, see less, eat less, hurt more, our friends die, we know that we ourselves will soon be dead…It’s not surprising, perhaps, that we easily slide into a general pessimism about life, but it is very boring and it makes dreary last years even drearier. Whereas if, flitting in and out of our awareness, there are people who are beginning, to whom the years ahead are long and full of who knows what, it is a reminder–indeed it enables us actually to feel again–that we are not just dots at the end of thin black lines projecting into nothingness, but are parts of the broad, many-coloured river teeming with beginnings, ripenings, decayings, new beginnings–are still parts of it, and our dying will be part of it just as these children’s being young is, so while we still have the equipment

What is so good about it is not just the affection young people inspire and how interesting their lives are to watch. They also, just by being there, provide a useful counteraction to a disagreeable element in an old person’s life. We tend to become convinced that everything is getting worse simply because within our own boundaries things are doing so. We are becoming less able to do things we would like to do, can hear less, see less, eat less, hurt more, our friends die, we know that we ourselves will soon be dead…It’s not surprising, perhaps, that we easily slide into a general pessimism about life, but it is very boring and it makes dreary last years even drearier. Whereas if, flitting in and out of our awareness, there are people who are beginning, to whom the years ahead are long and full of who knows what, it is a reminder–indeed it enables us actually to feel again–that we are not just dots at the end of thin black lines projecting into nothingness, but are parts of the broad, many-coloured river teeming with beginnings, ripenings, decayings, new beginnings–are still parts of it, and our dying will be part of it just as these children’s being young is, so while we still have the equipment to see this, let us not waste our time grizzling.

have accepted a great deal of Christ’s teaching partly because it was given me in childhood by people I loved, and partly because it continues to make sense and the nearer people come to observing it the better I like them (not that they come, or ever have come, very near it, and nor have I).

much of the painting and sculpture I love best (and such things matter a lot to me) was made by artists who lived long enough ago to believe that heaven and hell were real. In the Correr Museum in Venice, coming suddenly on Dieric Bouts’s little Madonna nursing the Child, I was struck through with delight as I never was by a mother and child by, for example, Picasso or Mary Casson, and I cannot remember being more intensely moved by any painting than by Piero della Francesca’s Nativity.

I put my hand on hers. Her head shifted, eyelids heaved up. Her eyes focused. Out of deep in that dying woman came a great flash of recognition and of utmost joy. My brother was there. Later he said, ‘That was a very beautiful smile she gave you.’ It was the love I had never doubted flaming into visibility. I saw what I had always believed in.