Paradise Postponed Quotes

She felt a tightness in her chest and sent for Dr Simcox. 'What's the trouble?' 'Look out there, that's the trouble! It's so green and quiet and it's always bloody raining.' 'That's England, Mrs Mallard-Greene. I'm afraid there's no known cure for it.

Reducing human beings to the faint after-image of some omnipotent deity, or trying to give human life meaning by postponing real fulfilment to some post-mortem paradise ... can actually threaten to rob real life of its meaningfulness.

What on earth was Henry talking about?' 'His soul. I wonder where he keeps it.

Oh, you think everyone's interesting. That's because you're a Red. I don't. I believe that quite a lot of people were just manufactured when God was thinking of something else.

He's a cabinet minister and his mother was a cook. My father was a doctor and I'm a cook. Perhaps I passed him on the way down, or did he pass me on the way up?

She believed that, in an ideal world, the working class would rule the country, but she had no particular desire to ask any of them to tea.

Alfie Dawlish. Invented all sorts of imaginary ailments for the family at the Manor so he could rob them and treat the village for nothing. It was his primitive version of the Health Service

You can't change people. You know that. You can't make them stop hating each other, or longing to blow up the world, not by walking through the rain and singing to a small guitar. Most you can do for them is pull them out of the womb, thump them on the backside and let them get on with it.

In the middle of the swinging sixties people in England were apparently under some sort of obligation to have a good time and most of them didn't. A Russian and an American walked about in space to no one's particular advantage. The Beatles received their British Empire medals and, so it was said, smoked cannabis in the lavatories at Buckingham Palace. American aeroplanes were bombing Vietnam, but no one seemed to talk about the nuclear holocaust any more.

The first sight of the Rapstone Valley is of something unexpectedly isolated and uninterruptedly rural; a solitary jogger is the only outward sign of urban pollution.

A hundred pounds! He couldn't remember ever having seen a hundred pounds, all at one time. He found himself envying his father, who had nothing to worry about except the future of mankind.

Take sex, for instance.' 'What do you want me to do with it?' 'Try to be serious for a moment. Take the sex life of our father.' [...] Even after a couple of brandies he felt extremely reluctant to discuss sex and his father. 'It's something I'd rather not think about,' he said. 'We all come into existence as a result of a momentary embrace by our parents which find impossible to imagine. [...] We all assume we're the result of our own particular immaculate conception.

He’s a cabinet minister and his mother was a cook. My father was a doctor and I’m a cook. Perhaps I passed him on the way down, or did he pass me on the way up?

When Fred asked Agnes’s father if that was why he had wanted to become a doctor he got a short answer. ‘Balls! I had no choice. I couldn’t pass the bloody exams to be a vet.

She’s young, you see. Young people alarm him now.

We all come into existence as a result of a momentary embrace by our parents which we find impossible to imagine.

Dieting: the only excuse for dieting is poverty.

I’ve got no time for blokes who sit in Kathmandu contemplating their navels and putting up with poverty and starvation, and the worst class system outside Bournemouth.

Look out there, that’s the trouble! It’s so green and quiet and it’s always bloody raining.’ ‘That’s England, Mrs Mallard-Greene. I’m afraid there’s no known cure for it.

So you admit the existence of a God who doesn’t like to be pestered?

that our lives are so different from our parents’. We think differently, feel differently, all that sort of thing. But it’s not true, is it? We all find out the same things, and when we’ve found them out, well, then it’s time to

You know we all think, I certainly thought,’ Simeon told him, ‘that our lives are so different from our parents’. We think differently, feel differently, all that sort of thing. But it’s not true, is it? We all find out the same things, and when we’ve found them out, well, then it’s time to go.

We are not to regress to pure id, as if paradise were a social psychosis. We are also not to export responsibility onto the plane of the Symbolic, as if fidelity requires the enslavement of the obsessive neurotic. We are not to evade the big questions so as to postpone our confrontation with the pure truth that we tend to repeat what is not working, as if security can be found in hysteria. We can only offer a caution: who is asking us to see the world this way? And why are we so eager to submit to the Other’s self-proclaimed representative, whether in the form of a person or an ideology?

They did everything but slap each other, and finally they did that. What postponed the inevitable were loves forlorn and a very young girl in too tight clothes tapping on the screen door.