Quartet In Autumn Quotes

She likes to read, she reads all the time, and she prefers to be reading several things at once, she says it gives endless perspective and dimension.

Always be reading something, he said. Even when we're not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.

The lifelong friends, he said. We sometimes wait a lifetime for them.

We have to hope, Daniel was saying, that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters.

She had always been an unashamed reader of novels.

Is it possible, he said, to be in love not with someone but with their eyes. I mean, with how eyes that aren't yours let you see where you are, who you are.

Language is like poppies. It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about.

Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?

That's the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it's in their nature.

I'm tired of the news. I'm tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren't, and deals so simplistically with what's truly appalling. I'm tired of the vitriol. I'm tired of anger. I'm tired of the meanness. I'm tired of selfishness. I'm tired of how we're doing nothing to stop it. I'm tired of how we're encourageing it. I'm tired of the violence that's on it's way, that's coming, that hasn't happened yet. I'm tired of liars. I'm tired of sanctified liars. I'm tired of how those liars have let this happen. I'm tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose. I'm tired of lying governments. I'm tired of people not caring whether they're being lied to anymore. I'm tired of being made to feel this fearful.

But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They're foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless.

The pauses are a precise language, more a language than actual language is, Elisabeth thinks.

Time travel is real, Daniel said. We do it all the time. Moment to moment, minute to minute.

A great many men don't understand a woman full of joy, even more don't understand paintings full of joy by a woman.

Words are themselves organisms, ...

We have to hope that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters.

There's always, there'll always be, more story. That's what story is.

In fact all he can remember of her is that he sent her a postcard he wished afterwards he'd kept for himself.

But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff.

How very disappointing truth is sometimes.

It is perhaps rather fine, after all, being dead. Highly underrated in the modern western world.

Only what slips through one's fingers, only what is never expressed in words, has no thoughts, exists completely. That is the price of proximity: you don't see it. Don't know that it's there. Then it is over, then you see it.

All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they'd really lost. All across the country, people felt they'd really won. All across the country, people felt they'd done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing. All across the country, people looked up Google: what is EU? All across the country, people looked up Google: move to Scotland. All across the country, people looked up Google: Irish Passport Applications. All across the country, people called each other cunts. All across the country, people felt unsafe. All across the country, people were laughing their heads off. All across the country, people felt legitimised. All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked. All across the country, people felt righteous. All across the country, people felt sick. All across the country, people felt history at their shoulder. All across the country, people felt history meant nothing. All across the country, people felt like they counted for nothing. All across the country, people had pinned their hopes on it. All across the country, people waved flags in the rain. All across the country, people drew swastika graffiti. All across the country, people threatened other people. All across the country, people told people to leave. All across the country, the media was insane. All across the country, politicians lied. All across the country, politicians fell apart. All across the country, politicians vanished...

It's all right to forget, you know, he said. It's good to. In fact, we have to forget things sometimes. Forgetting it is important. We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of a rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we'd never sleep ever again.

Only what slips through one's fingers, only what is never expressed in words, has no thoughts, exists completely. That is the price of proximity: you don't see it. Don't know that it's there. Then it is over, then you see it. The yellow-red leaves lying wet and smooth on the flagstones between the houses. How the stone darkens when it rains, lightens as it dries.

Is there any escaping the junkshop of the self?

This isn’t fiction, the man says. This is the Post Office.

Somehow this wasn't the same as melancholy. It was something else, about how melancholy and nostalgia weren't relevant in the slightest. Things just happened. Then they were over. Time just passed. Partly it felt unpleasant, to think like that, rude even. Partly it felt good. It was kind of a relief.

What was to be the value of the long looked forward to, Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders, Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit? The serenity only a deliberate hebetude, The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets Useless in the darkness into which they peered Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience. The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, For the pattern is new in every moment And every moment is a new and shocking Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.

When the state is not kind, then the people are fodder.

One did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning.

Cut this tree I'm living in down. Hollow its trunk out. Make me all over again, with what you scooped out of its insides. Slide the new me back inside the old trunk. Burn me. Burn the tree. Spread the ashes, for luck, where you want next year's crops to grow. Birth me and the tree Next summer's sun Midwinter guarantee

What I do when it distresses me that there's something I can't remember, is. Are you listening? Yes, Elisabeth said through the crying. I imagine that whatever it is I've forgotten is folded close to me, like a sleeping bird. What kind of bird? Elisabeth said. A wild bird, Daniel said. Any kind. You'll know what kind when it happens. Then, what I do is, I just hold it there, without holding it to tight, and I let it sleep. And that's that.

Nothing comic isn’t serious.

In her dream, she slapped the past in its face.

Language is like poppies. It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about. Then the seedheads rattle, the seeds fall out. Then there's even more language waiting to come up.

It's a question of how we regard our situations, how we look and see where we are, and how we choose, if we can, when we are seeing undeceivedly, not to despair and, at the same time, how best to act. Hope is exactly that, that's all it is, a mater of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we're here for a mere blink of the eyes, that's all.

I'm everything that makes everything. I'm everything that unmakes everything. I'm fire. I'm flood. I'm pestilence. I'm the ink, the paper, the grass, the tree, the leaves, the leaf, the greenness in the leaf. I'm the vein in the leaf. I'm the voice that tells no story.

Myself, I thought about you the whole time. Even when I wasn't thinking about you, I thought about you.

There's always, there'll always be, more story. That's what story is...It's the never-ending leaf-fall.

Time travel is real, Daniel said. We do it all the time. Moment to moment, minute to minute.

Ez egy olyan kor, amikor az emberek mondanak egymásnak dolgokat, és az egészből soha nem lesz párbeszéd.

I think just a cup of tea...' There was something to be said for tea and a comfortable chat about crematoria.

Regrets when you're dead? A past when you're dead? Is there never any escaping the junkyard of the self?

Who's that? (Silence.) Who's there? (Silence.) God? Not exactly. Well, who? Where do I start? I'm the butterfly antenna. I'm the chemicals that paint's made of. I'm the person dead at the water's edge. I'm the water. I'm the edge. I'm the skin cells. I'm the smell of disinfectant. I'm that thing they rub against your mouth to moisten it, can you feel it? I'm soft. I'm hard. I'm glass. I'm sand. I'm a yellow plastic bottle. I'm all the plastics in the seas and in the guts of all the fishes. I'm the fishes. I'm the seas. I'm molluscs in the seas. I'm the flattened-out old beer can. I'm the shopping trolley in the canal. I'm the note on the stave, the bird on the line. I'm the stave. I'm the line. I'm spiders. I'm seeds. I'm water. I'm heart. I'm the cotton of the sheet. ..... I'm pollution. I'm a fall of horseshit on a country road a hundred years ago. ... I'm the fly .....I haven't even started telling you what I am. I'm everything that makes everything. I'm everything that unmakes everything. .... I'm the voice that tells no story.

And then what happened next, well, it happened next, and history, that other word for irony, went its own foul witty way, sang its own foul witty ditty, and the girl was the one who died young in this story.

Her father was stern. Her father disapproved. Her father had very strong reservations...Half Belgian, half Persian, staunch British conservative, he'd seen the Himalayas and Harrogate and had chosen accountancy.

There's no point in making up a world, Elisabeth said, when there's already a real world, There's just the world, and there's the truth about the world. You mean there's the truth, and there's the made-up version of it that we get told about the world, Daniel said. No. The world exists. Stories are made up, Elisabeth said. But no less true for that, Daniel said.

It's alright to forget, you know. It's good to. In fact we have to forget things sometimes. Forgetting it is important. We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we'd never sleep ever again.

It is possible, he said, to be in love not with someone but with their eyes. I mean, with how eyes that aren't yours let you see where you are, who you are.

Brave old world.

But at least it made one realize that life still held infinite possibilities for change.

I can remember once sitting opposite my brother and feeling so much love for him that it was almost as though I was knitted to him.

Here’s an old story so new that it’s still in the middle of happening, writing itself right now with no knowledge of where or how it’ll end.

For if there is one thing that characterizes nature, it is abundance, a wild opulence of leaves and grass, petals, and stems and branches, an unrestrained waste of clorophyil.

Végül is elég kellemes halottnak lenni. Nagyon alulértékelik a modern nyugati világban.

In a better world, he thought, I'd have followed that man to hell.

A room in Holmhurst was the last thing she'd come to - better to lie down in the wood under the beech leaces and the bracken and wait quietly for death.

But love was terribly important. She didn’t mean romantic love. Generalized sort of love.

She has found by experience that she is in a world where female emancipation is a password and not a fact—she is beautiful, therefore she should not be clever.

It isn’t that kind of relationship,” Elisabeth says to a lover. “It isn’t even the least physical. It never has been. But it’s love. I can’t pretend it isn’t.

But pure joy! He’d forgotten what it feels like, to feel. To feel even just the thought of one’s own bared self near someone else’s beauty.

Seems the self you get left with on the shore, in the end, is the self that you were when you went.

To be included in someone's absence, it is an honour, and it asks quiet. It asks respect.

Daniel in the gallery sees one of her hands, the one on the rail of the witness box, cover itself in little shoots and buds. The buds split open. There are leaves coming out of her fingers.

Did I? Daniel said. While we’re here. Well. While we're here, let’s just always hold out hope for the person who says it. Says what, Mr Gluck? Elisabeth said. Sure you want war? Daniel said.

Though actually I think that being in one's twenties is in itself to be restricted. At that age one's vigour is great, and one looks ahead, keeps one's eyes fixed on things to come, and of the things found in one's surroundings the most important are always those that hold the most promise. At the same time, and this is the cruelty of it, this forward-looking gaze is constantly confronted with the limitations of one's character, constantly coming up against a sense of stagnation - hence the youthful fear of stagnating intellectually.

Letty allowed her to ramble on while she looked around the wood, remembering its autumn carpet of beech leaves and wondering if it could be the kind of place to lie down in and prepare for death when life became too much to be endured.

You will come to see it in your own way, you will experience things for yourself and live a life of your own, so of course it is primarily for my own sake that I am doing this: showing you the world, little one, makes my life worth living.

... free spirit arrives on earth equipped with the skill and the vision capable of blasting the tragic stuff that happens to us all into space, where it dissolves away to nothing whenever you pay any attention to the lifeforce in her pictures.

The words had acted like a charm. They'd released it all, in seconds. They'd made everything happening stand just far enough away. &emsp It was nothing less than magic. &emsp Who needs a passport? &emsp Who am I? Where am I? What am I? &emsp I'm reading.

For it isn't the pupils you are seeing then, not the irises nor the whites of the eyes. It is the soul, the archaic light of the soul the eyes are filled with, and to gaze into the eyes of the one you love when love is at its most powerful belongs among the highest joys.

A minute ago it was June. Now the weather is September. The crops are high, about to be cut, bright, golden, November? unimaginable. Just a month away. The days are still warm, the air in the shadows sharper. The nights are sooner, chillier, the light a little less each time. Dark at half-past seven. Dark at quarter past seven, dark at seven. The greens of the trees have been duller since August, since July really. But the flowers are still coming. The hedgerows are still humming. The shed is already full of apples and the tree's still covered in them. The birds are on the powerlines. The swifts left week ago. They're hundreds of miles from here by now, somewhere over the ocean.

Has it ever struck you people how arrogant you are?" it asked, huge hands taking an attitude of query that bordered on accusation. "You're talking of slaughtering a nation. Thousands of innocent people destroyed, lands made barren, mountains leveled and the sea pulled up over them like a blanket. And you're feeling sorry for yourself that you had to wring a bird's neck as a boy? How can anyone have feelings that delicate and that numbed both at the same time?

We have to hope that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters. It is the only responsibility memory has. But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They're foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quote regardless.

thirty two years old, no-fixed-hours casual contract junior lecturer at a university in London, living the dream, her mother says, and she is, if the dream means having no job security and almost everything being too expensive to do and that you’re still in the same rented flat you had when you were a student over a decade ago …

Life? was what you worked to catch, the intense happiness of an object slightly set apart from you.

Look at that. He can sew. Not something he could do while he was alive. Death. Full of surprises.

It’s funny to be sitting on such an uncommunal communal chair.

Hello Mr. Gluck, she’ll say if he does. Sorry I’m late. I was having my face measured and rejected for being the wrong specification.

All the other houses have been pulled out of the street like bad teeth.

Excuse me, ladies, Hannah said. This is where I get off.

I like the idea of blue and pink together, Elisabeth said.

The vintage cars fume along through England; outside the car windows the passing cow parsley is tall, beaded with rain, strong, green. It is incidental. This incidentality is, Elisabeth finds herself thinking, a profound statement. The cow parsley has a language of its own, one that nobody on the programme or making the programme knows or notices is being spoken.

There's no point in making up a world, Elisabeth said, when there's already a real world, There's just the world, and there's the truth about the world. / You mean there's the truth, and there's the made-up version of it that we get told about the world, Daniel said. / No. The world exists. Stories are made up, Elisabeth said. / But no less true for that, Daniel said. That's ultra-crazy talk, Elisabeth said. / And whoever makes up the story makes up the world, Daniel said. So always try to welcome people into the home of your story. That’s my suggestion.

So many things seemed to come in plastic bags now that it was difficult to keep track of them. The main thing was not to throw it away carelessly, better still to put it away in a safe place, because there was a note printed on it which read 'To avoid danger of suffocation keep this wrapper away from babies and children'. They could have said from middle-aged and elderly persons too, who might well have an irresistible urge to suffocate themselves.

He wraps it around him. It’s a good fit, it smells leafy and fresh. He would make a good tailor. He has made something, made something of himself. His mother would be pleased at last. Oh God. Is there still mother after death?

Life? was what you worked to catch, the intense happiness of an object slightly set apart from you. Painting? was what you did, alone, and you sat there, and it was your own terrible fight or your own lovely bit, but it was really terribly alone. To take the moment before something had actually happened, and you didn't know if it was going to be terrible or if it might be very funny, something extraordinary actually happening and yet everybody around it not taking any notice.

One blink of a camera eye (can’t quite put his finger on the name of the photographer) and that child dressed in leaves became all these things: sad, terribly, beautiful, funny, terrifying, dark, light, charming, fairystory, folkstory, truth.

It’s all right to forget, you know, he said. It’s good to. In fact, we have to forget things sometimes. Forgetting it is important. We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of a rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we’d never sleep ever again.

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind. But to what purpose Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know. Other echoes Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow? Quick, said the bird, find them, find them, Round the corner. Through the first gate, Into our first world, shall we follow The deception of the thrush? Into our first world. There they were, dignified, invisible, Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves, In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air, And the bird called, in response to The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery, And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at. There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting. So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern, Along the empty alley, into the box circle, To look down into the drained pool. Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged, And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly, The surface glittered out of heart of light, And they were behind us, reflected in the pool. Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty. Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, containing laughter. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.

Probably what was history then is nothing but footnote now, and on that note, he notes she's barefoot, alone in the summer night light of the hall of the great stately house where, by coincidence (history, footnote), he happens to know that the song Rule Britannia was first ever sung.

The man creases up. It seems he was joking; his shoulders go up and down but no sound comes out of him. It’s like laughter, but also like a parody of laughter, and simultaneously a bit like he’s having an asthma attack. Maybe you’re not allowed to laugh out loud behind the counter of the main Post Office.

We have to hope that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters. It is the only responsibility memory has. But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They're foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless.

Cut this tree I’m living in down. Hollow its trunk out. Make me all over again, with what you scooped out of its insides. Slide the new me back inside the old trunk. Burn me. Burn the tree. Spread the ashes, for luck, where you want next year’s crops to grow. Birth me all over again Burn me and the tree Next summer’s sun Midwinter guarantee

It was the end of a winter; this one was the winter of 2002-3. Elisabeth was eighteen. It was February. She had gone down to London to march in the protest. Not In Her Name. All across the country people had done the same thing and millions more people had all across the world. On the Monday after, she wandered through the city; strange to be walking streets where life was going on as normal, traffic and people going their usual backwards and forwards along streets that had had no traffic, had felt like they’d belonged to the two million people from their feet on the pavement all the way up to sky because of something to do with truth, when she’d walked the exact same route only the day before yesterday.

It feels like I have started something new, something quite different, and that is this family. I think of it every day, that what matters is now, that the years we are living through now are when everything important happens. My previous life seems more and more distant. I am no longer preoccupied with my own childhood. Not interested in my student years, my twenties. All that seems far, far away. And I can imagine how it will be when what is happening now is over, when the children have moved out, the thought that these were the important years, this is when I was alive. Why didn’t I appreciate it while I had it? Because then, I sometimes think, I hadn’t had it yet. Only what slips through one’s fingers, only what is never expressed in words… exists completely. That is the price of proximity: you don’t see it. Don’t know that it’s there. Then it is over, then you see it.

Daniel is asleep. A care assistant, a different one today is swishingaroundthe room with a mop that smells of pine cleaner. Elisabeth wonders what's doing to happen to all the care assistants. She realizes she hasn't so far encountered a single care assistant here who isn't from somewhere else in the world. That morning on the radio she;d heard a spokesperson say, but it's not just that we;ve been rhetorically and practically encouraging the opposite of integration for immigrants to this country. It's that we've been rhetorically and practically encouraging ourselves not to integrate. We've been doing this as a matter of self-policing since Thatcher taught us to be selfish and not just to think but to believe that there's no such thing as society. Then the other spokesperson in the dialogue said, well, you would say that. Get over it. Grow up. Your time's over. Democracy. You lost.

Olen väsynyt uutisiin. Väsyttää nähdä miten niissä tehdään mitättömistä asioista suuren luokan tapauksia ja käsitellään läpihuutojuttuina sellaista mikä on oikeasta karmeaa. Olen väsynyt katkeruuteen. Väsynyt vihaan. Väsynyt ilkeyteen. Väsynyt itsekkyyteen. Olen väsynyt siihen ettei kukaan meistä tee mitään sen nujertamiseksi. Väsynyt siihen että sitä lietsotaan vain lisää. Olen väsynyt olemassa olevaan väkivaltaan ja tulevaan väkivaltaan, siihen mitä ei ole vielä tapahtunut.

That’s why you need to go to collage, Daniel said. You’re using the wrong word, Elisabeth said. The word you’re using is for when you cut out pictures of things or coloured shapes and stick them on paper. I disagree, Daniel said. Collage is an institute of education where all the rules can be thrown up into the air, and size and space and time and foreground and background all become relative, and because of these skills everything you think you know gets made into something new and strange.