Ewan Succession Quotes

How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events. He

The very word 'history' conjured a dull success of thrones and murderous clerical wrangling.

As he pushed her by the shoulder toward the gate, the rising howl commenced. Nightmares had beome a science. Someone, a mere human, had taken the time to dream up this satanic howling. And what success! It was the sound of panic itself, mounting and straining toward the extinction they all knew, individually, to be theirs. It was a sound you were obliged to take personally.

The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine.

Standing here, as immune to the cold as a marble statue, gazing towards Charlotte Street, towards a foreshortened jumble of façades, scaffolding and pitched roofs, Henry thinks the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece--millions teeming around the accumulated and layered achievements of the centuries, as though around a coral reef, sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part, nearly everyone wanting it to work. And the Perownes own corner, a triumph of congruent proportion; the perfect square laid out by Robert Adam enclosing a perfect circle of garden--an eighteenth century dream bathed and embraced by modernity, by street light from above, and from below by fibre-optic cables, and cool fresh water coursing down pipes, and sewage borne away in an instant of forgetting.

devised; then came the problems of success itself, unbelievable sales, new production quotas,

How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events. He had never made an important decision.

football in the immaculate empty cupboards. He had lived there three years, he had told me. He was successful and rich and he inhabited a house of failure, of abandoned hope, probably.

This was how to steer a life successfully, Roland thought. Make a choice, act! That’s the lesson. A shame not to have known the trick long ago. Good decisions came less through rational calculation, more from sudden good moods. But so too did some of his worst decisions. But that was not for now.

I didn't know, nor have I ever discovered, who let go first. I'm not prepared to accept that it was me. But everyone claims not to have been first. What is certain is that if we had not broken ranks, our collective weight would have brought the balloon to earth a quarter of the way down the slope a few seconds later as the gust subsided. But as I've said, there was no team, there was no plan, no agreement to be broken. No failure. So can we accept that it was right, every man for himself? Were we all happy afterwards that this was a reasonable course? We never had that comfort, for there was a deeper covenant, ancient and automatic, written in our nature. Co-operation - the basis of our earliest hunting successes, the force behind our evolving capacity for language, the glue of our social cohesion. Our misery in the aftermath was proof that we knew we had failed ourselves. But letting go was in our nature too. Selfishness is also written in our hearts.

The academic movement known generally as ‘theory’ had taken social history ‘by storm’ – her phrase. Since she had studied at a traditional university which offered old-fashioned narrative accounts of the past, she was having to take on a new vocabulary, a new way of thinking. Sometimes, as we lay side by side in bed (the evening of the tarragon chicken had been a success) I listened to her complaints and tried to look and sound sympathetic. It was no longer proper to assume that anything at all had ever happened in the past. There were only historical documents to consider, and changing scholarly approaches to them, and our own shifting relationship to those approaches, all of which were determined by ideological context, by relations to power and wealth, to race, class, gender and sexual orientation.

But he did not follow the explanation. In the management of his life he was foolish. In mathematics, moronic. His IQ must have halved, for here was another of those moments when he knew he had reached the summit of his understanding. A ceiling, a mountain fog through which he could not pass. His eleven-year-old son was on higher ground, in a clear space his father would never know. As he walked he thought that, apart from raising a child, all else in his life had been and remained formless and he could not see how to change it. Money could not save him. Nothing achieved. What happened to the tune he had started to write more than thirty years ago and was going to send to the Beatles? Nothing. What had he made since? Nothing, beyond a million tennis strokes, a thousand renditions of “Climb Every Mountain.” He blushed now to read his earnest poems. His father was cut down in an instant. His mother was beginning a decline into mindlessness. He knew that a scan would confirm it. Both fates spoke to his own. In theirs he saw the measure of his own existence. He remembered his parents well enough at his age now. From then onwards nothing changed for them apart from physical decline and illness. How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events. He had never made an important decision. Except to leave school. No, that too was a reaction. He supposed he had put together a sort of education for himself, but that was messily done in a spirit of embarrassment or shame.

A story best told at speed. After finals, more exams, then the call to the bar, pupillage, a lucky invitation to prestigious chambers, some early success defending hopeless cases—how sensible it had seemed, to delay a child until her early thirties. And when those years came, they brought complex worthwhile cases, more success. Jack was also hesitant, arguing for holding back another year or two. Mid-thirties then, when he was teaching in Pittsburgh and she worked a fourteen-hour day, drifting deeper into family law as the idea of her own family receded, despite the visits of nephews and nieces. In the following years, the first rumors that she might be elected precociously to the bench and required to be on circuit. But the call didn’t come, not yet. And in her forties, there sprang up anxieties about elderly gravids and autism. Soon after, more young visitors to Gray’s Inn Square, noisy demanding great-nephews, great-nieces, reminded her how hard it would be to squeeze an infant into her kind of life. Then rueful thoughts of adoption, some tentative inquiries—and throughout the accelerating years that followed, occasional agonies of doubt, firm late-night decisions concerning surrogate mothers undone in the early-morning rush to work. And when at last, at nine thirty one morning at the Royal Courts of Justice, she was sworn in by the Lord Chief Justice and took her oath of allegiance and her Judicial Oath before two hundred of her bewigged colleagues, and she stood proudly before them in her robes, the subject of a witty speech, she knew the game was up; she belonged to the law as some women had once been brides of Christ.

All copulating creatures are vulnerable to attack, but selection over time must have proved that reproductive success was best served by undivided attention. Better to allow the occasional couple to be eaten midrapture than dilute by one jot a vigorous procreational urge. But for seconds on end I had wholesomely and simultaneously indulged two of life's central, antithetical pleasures, reading and fucking.