The Casual Vacancy Quotes

It was strange how your brain could know what your heart refused to accept.

You must accept the reality of other people. You think that reality is up for negotiation, that we think it's whatever you say it is. You must accept that we are as real as you are; you must accept that you are not God.

But who could bear to know which stars were already dead, she thought, blinking up at the night sky; could anybody stand to know that they all were?

The mistake ninety-nine percent of humanity made, as far as Fats could see, was being ashamed of what they were; lying about it, trying to be somebody else.

It was so good to be held. If only their relationship could be distilled into simple, wordless gestures of comfort. Why had humans ever learned to talk?

He never seemed to grasp the immense mutability of human nature, nor to appreciate that behind every nondescript face lay a wild and unique hinterland like his own.

He gave everything to everybody. Except to me.

Things denied, things untold, things hidden and disguised.

Choice was dangerous: you had to forgo all other possibilities when you chose.

Krystal’s slow passage up the school had resembled the passage of a goat through the body of a boa constrictor, being highly visible and uncomfortable for both parties concerned.

Yes, well, principles are sometimes the problem, if you ask me,' said Miles. 'Often what's needed is a bit of common sense.' 'Which is the name people usually give to their prejudices,' rejoined Kay.

It frightened people when you were honest; it shocked them.

Was it love when somebody filled a space in your life that yawned inside you, once they had gone?

How awful it was, thought Tessa, remembering Fats the toddler, the way tiny ghosts of your living children haunted your heart; they could never know, and would hate it if they did, how their growing was a constant bereavement.

Birth and death: there was the same consciousness of heightened existence and of her own elevated importance

You’re not supposed to dislike your own child. You were supposed to like them no matter what, even if they were not what you wanted.

Sometimes, if she simply remained quiet, and let the inadequacy of his excuses reverberate on the air, he became ashamed and backtracked.

Stone dead," said Howard, as though there were degrees of deadness, and the kind that Barry Fairbrother had contracted was particularly sordid.

Every hour that passed added to her grief, because it bore her further away from the living man, and because it was a tiny foretaste of the eternity she would have to spend without him.

According to Nietzche," said a sharp new voice, making them all jump, "philosophy is the biography of the philosopher.

He dreamed of London and of a life that mattered.

Parminder kept her unwept tears locked tightly inside where they seemed to undergo an alchemical transformation, returning to the outer world as lava slides of rage.

He had fought back with every weapon in his arsenal, being alternatively obtuse, evasive and pedantic, for it was wonderful how you could obscure an emotional issue by appearing to seek precision.

He tried to give his wife pleasure in little ways, because he had come to realize, after nearly two decades together, how often he disappointed her in the big things. It was never intentional. They simply had very different notions of what ought to take up most space in life.

She was on edge, feeling that she might snap or cry at the smallest provocation.

The mistake ninety-nine percent of humanity made, as far as Fats could see, were being ashamed of what they were, lying about it, trying to be somebody else. Honesty was Fats' currency, his weapon and defense. It frightened people when you were honest; it shocked them. Other people, Fats had discovered, were mired in embarrasment and pretense, terrified that their truths might leak out, but Fats was attracted by rawness, by everything that was ugly but honest, by the dirty things about which the likes of his father felt humiliated and disgusted. Fats thought a lot about messiahs and pariahs; about men labeled mad or criminal; noble misfits shunned by the sleepy masses.

Sukhvinder wished that she could be more like Krystal: funny and tough; impossible to intimidate; always coming out fighting.

Some of her self-hatred had oozed out with the blood.

She seemed to think that one of the perks of marriage was that it gave you rights of comment and intrusion over single people's love lives.

Beauty is geometry.

Studying the young woman’s long thin legs, Tessa wondered how different her life would have been if she had had legs like that. She could not help but suspect that it would have been almost entirely different.

Life, for Colin, was one long brace against pain and disappointment, and everybody apart from his wife was an enemy until proven otherwise.

Everything had shattered. The fact that it was all still there — the walls and the chairs and the children’s pictures on the walls — meant nothing. Every atom of it had been blasted apart and reconstituted in an instant, and its appearance of permanence and solidity was laughable; it would dissolve at a touch, for everything was suddenly tissue-thin and friable.

Their reward for enduring the awful experience was the right to tell people about it.

But Colin's only understanding of love was of limitless loyalty, boundless tolerance:

Gavin saw a grave purely as a marker for the place where a corpse was decomposing; a nasty thought, yet people took it into their heads to visit and bring flowers, as though it might yet recover.

Fats was starting to think that if you flipped every bit of received wisdom on its head you would have the truth. He wanted to journey through dark labyrinths and wrestle with the strangeness that lurked within; he wanted to crack open piety and expose hypocrisy; he wanted to break taboos and squeeze wisdom from their bloody hearts; he wanted to achieve a state of amoral grace, and be baptised backwards into ignorance and simplicity.

She was actively frightened of imparting confidences, because she feared that they might betray the world of oddness that lived inside her

If she could have died...if she could have disappeared forever...but the solid surface of things refused to dissolve around her, and her body, her hateful hermaphrodite's body, continued in its stubborn, lumpen way, to live...

Both could feel the relationship crumbling to pieces beneath the weight of everything that Gavin refused to say.

Once, long ago, Parminder had told Barry the story of Bhai Kanhaiya, the Sikh hero who had administered to the needs of those wounded in combat, whether friend or fo. When asked why he gave aid indiscriminately, Bahai Kanhaiya had replied that the light of God shone from every soul, and that he had been unable to distinguish between them.

She had a way of moving that moved him as much as music, which was what moved him most of all. Surely the spirit animating that pearless body must be unusual too? Why would nature make a vessel like that, if not to contain something still more valuable?

Howard and Shirley were clothed, always, in an invisible layer of decorum that they never laid aside.

When you were straight, evil thoughts and memories came pouring up out of the darkness inside you; buzzing black flies clinging to the insides of your skull.

He might have been encased in a thick glass bubble, so separate did he feel from his three dining companions. It was a sensation with which he was only too familiar, that of walking in a giant sphere of worry, enclosed by it, watching his own terrors roll by, obscuring the outside world.

She kept asking herself whether, if he had looked cleaner, she might have been more concerned; whether, on some subliminal level, she had confused his obvious signs of neglect with street-smartness, toughness and resilience.

Pagford, which by night was no more than a cluster of twinkling lights in a dark hollow far below, was emerging into chilly sunlight.

The sky was a cold iron-grey, like the underside of a shield. A sharp breeze lifted the hems of skirts and rattled the leaves on the immature trees; a spiteful, chill wind that sought out your weakest places, the nape of your neck and your knees, and which denied you the comfort of dreaming, of retreating a little from reality.

They were the reason that he kept faith with his stars, that reinforced him in his belief that the universe had more in store for him than the mug's game of working for a modest salary until he retired or died,

You've got to work. It's about structure. It's about discipline. It's all these deadly things that your school teacher told you you needed... You need it. Jo speaking to Charlie Rose re: writing

Krystal flung herself violently off the chair, away from her mother. She was surprised to feel warm liquid flowing down her cheeks, and thought confusedly of blood, but it was tears, only tears, clear and shining on her fingertips when she wiped them away.

He sobbed in desperation at the burden of fear he carried with him every day of his life.

Her grief was so big and wild it terrified her, like an evil beast that had erupted from under the floorboards.

He was slumped in the back, gazing out of the window, as though his parents were two people who had picked him up hitchhiking, connected to him merely by chance and proximity.

He was born with a weakness he didn't know about.

Wordlessly, Kay stroked his arm, reflecting that she had never been able to afford to go to pieces.

When she tallied kindness she subtracted abandonment.

All she had left of her old life and her old uncertainties was attacking familiar targets.

The difficult thing, the glorious thing, was to be who you really were, even if that person was cruel or dangerous, particularly if cruel and dangerous. There was courage in not distinguishing the animal you happened to be. On the other hand, you had to avoid pretending to be more of an animal than you were: take that path, start exaggerating or faking and you became just another Cubby, just as much of a liar, a hypocrite

He wanted to journey through dark labyrinths and wrestle with the strangeness that lurked within; he wanted to crack open piety and expose hypocrisy; he wanted to break taboos and squeeze wisdom from their bloody hearts; he wanted to achieve a state of amoral grace, and be baptized backwards into ignorance and simplicity.

Personally, I think the "Potter" books have too many adverbs and not enough sex.

Andrew hated to see her humiliated and pathetic like this; but he half hated her too for landing herself in it, when any idiot could have seen...

She remembered telling a sturdy little girl in guidance that looks did not matter, that personality was much more important. What rubbish we tell children [...].

The habit of secrecy was very strong in her these days.

Mostly they laughed because they laughed, feeding off each other until they could barely stand.

I uprooted my daughter and left my job and moved house for you, and you treat me like a hooker you don’t have to pay.

Why was she always so craven, so apologetic? He had always seen Ruth as separate, good and untainted. As a child, his parents had appeared to him as starkly black and white, the one bad and frightening, the other good and kind. Yet as he had grown older, he kept coming up hard in his mind against Ruth's willing blindness, to her constant apologia for his father, to the unshakeable allegiance to her false idol.

Tessa fought down an impulse to snap. Colin had a habit of making sweeping judgements based on first impressions, on single actions. He never seemed to grasp the immense mutability of human nature, nor to appreciate that behind every nondescript face lay a wild and unique hinterland like his own.

He thought that it was all over, finished, done with. Andrew had never yet had reason to observe the first tiny bubble of fermenting yeast, in which was contained an inevitable, alchemical transformation.

Her family half carried Terri Weedon back down the royal blue carpet, and the congregation averted its eyes.

Sukhvinder is easily discouraged and needs to have more faith in her abilities. There! You see? Your teacher is saying you dont try hard enough, Sukhvinder.

Her gorgeousness was a matter of minor adjustments to a pattern, so that a breathtaking harmony resulted.

She pressed the plunger down hard, in hope and without regret...Krystal Weedon had achieved her only ambition: she had joined her brother where nobody could part them.

She liked to think of drowning, of sinking down into cool green water, and feeling herself slowly pressed into nothingness…

Shirley took the view that the past disintegrated if you never mentioned it.

Many years before, she had read, and recognized as true, the words of W. B. Yeats: 'A Pity beyond all telling is hit at the heart of love'. She had smiled over the poem, and stroked the page, because she had known both that she loved Colin, and that compassion formed a huge part of her love.

Yeah', said Fats. 'Fucking and dying. That's it, innit? Fucking and dying. That's life.' 'Trying to get a fuck and trying not to die.' 'Or trying to die', said Fats. 'Some people. Risking it.' 'Yeah, Risking it.' [...] 'Ans music', said Andrew quietly, watching the blue smoke hanging beneath the dark rock. 'Yeah', said Fats, in the distance. 'And music.

Tessa was convinced that it was a lie, and also that everything she had done in her life, telling herself that it was for the best, had been no more than blind selfishness, generating confusion and mess all around. But who could bear to know which stars were already dead, she thought, blinking up at the night sky; could anybody stand to know they all were?

She seemed to be trying to take in what Kay had said to her: this bizarre, dangerous advice about telling the truth

Most of them were devoid of workaday morals; they lied, misbehaved and cheated routinely, and yet their fury when wrongly accused was limitless and genuine.

But sometimes she found that memory confusing and doubted it.

Simon had the child's belief that the rest of the world exists as staging for their personal drama; destiny hung over him, casting clues and signs in his path, and he could not help feeling that ha had been vouchsafed a sign, a celestial wink.

He could not even take comfort in knowing that he had spent most of his adult life in dread of calamities had not materialized, because, by the law of averages, one of them was bound to come true one day.

Andrew indulged in a little fantasy in which his father dropped dead, gunned down by an invisible sniper. Andrew visualised himself patting his sobbing mother on the back while he telephoned the undertaker. He had a cigarette in his mouth as he ordered the cheapest coffin.

Naturally Shirley had known, as they slid stock words and phrases back and forth between them like beads on an abacus, that Howard must be as brimful of ecstasy as she was; but to express these feelings out loud, when the news of death was still fresh in the air, would have been tantamount to dancing naked and shrieking obscenities, and Howard and Shirley were clothed, always, in an invisible layer of decorum that they never laid aside.

Her face was a synthesis of perfect symmetry and unusual proportion; he could have gazed at it for hours, trying to locate the source of its fascination.

A resolution should not deal with more than one subject...Disregard of this rule usually leads to confused discussion and may lead to confused action...

They simply had very different notions of what ought to take up most space in life.

Krystal hated folders. All the stuff they wrote about you, and kept, and used against you afterwards.

You felt that she wanted things to go right for you, and not only for the forms.

Samantha sometimes found Miles absurd and, increasingly, dull. Every now and then, though, she enjoyed his pomposity in precisely the same spirit as she liked, on formal occasions, to wear a hat.

Fucking shut up, you whining cow, you didn't mind spending the money!' yelled Simon, his jaw jutting again; and Andrew wanted to roar at his mother to stay silent: she blabbed when any idiot could have told her she should keep quiet, and she kept quiet when she might have done good by speaking out; she never learned, she never saw any of it coming.

She navigated away from the Parish Council message board and dropped into her favorite medical website, where she painstakingly entered the words "brain" and "death" in the search box. The suggestions were endless. Shirley scrolled through the possibilities, her mild eyes rolling up and down, wondering to which of these deadly conditions, some of them unpronounceable, she owed her present happiness.

A life of ease and plenty dangled over his head like a great bulging pinata, which he might smash open if only he had a stick big enough, and the knowledge of when to strike. Simon had the child's belief that the rest of the world exists as staging for their personal drama; that destiny hung over him, casting clues and signs in his path, and he could not help feeling that he had been vouchsafed a sign, a celestial wink.

He had thought then of the nature of justice as he had come to know it: of his father as a pagan god, and of his mother as the high priestess of the cult, who attempted to interpret and intercede, usually failing, yet still insisting, in the face of all the evidence, that there was an underlying magnanimity and reasonableness to her deity.

What Fats wanted to recover was a kind of innocence, and the route he had chosen back to it was through all the things that were suppose to be bad for you, but which, paradoxically, seemed to Fats to be the one true way to authenticity; to a kind of purity. It was curious how often everything was back to front, the inverse of what they told you; Fats was starting to think that if you flipped every bit of received wisdom on its head you would have the truth. He wanted to journey through dark labyrinths and wrestle with the strangeness that lurked within; he wanted to crack open piety and expose hypocrisy; he wanted to break taboos and squeeze wisdom from their bloody hearts; he wanted to achieve a state of amoral grace, and be baptized backwards into ignorance and simplicity.

Disgust rose in Samantha like vomit. She wanted to seize the over-warm cluttered room and mash it between her hands, until the royal china, and the gas fire, and the gilt-framed pictures of Miles broke into jagged pieces; then, with wizened and painted Maureen trapped and squalling inside the wreckage, she wanted to heave it, like a celestial shot-putter, away into the sunset. The crushed lounge and doomed crone inside it, soared in her imagination through the heavens, plunging into the limitless ocean, leaving Samantha alone in the endless stillness of the universe.

She tamped down the awful urge to cry with a fierceness that her mother had always deplored, especially in the wake of her father’s death, when her other daughters, and the aunts and cousins, were all wailing and beating their breasts. ‘And you were his favourite too!’ But Parminder kept her unwept tears locked tightly inside where they seemed to undergo an alchemical transformation, returning to the outer world as lava slides of rage, disgorged periodically at her children and the receptionists at work.

Howard was almost as fond of this hall as he was of his own shop. The Brownies used it on Tuesdays, and the Women's Institute on Wednesdays. It had hosted jumble sales and Jubilee celebrations, wedding receptions and wakes, and it smelled of all of these things: of stale clothes and coffee urns, and the ghosts of home-baked cakes and meat salads; of dust and human bodies; but primarily of aged wood and stone.

It was easy to conjure him up this morning, when everything was quiet and still. A little, ginger-bearded man; she had been taller than him by half a head. She had never felt the slightest physical attraction towards him. 'What was love, after all?' thought Parminder, as a gentle breeze ruffled the tall hedge of leyland cypresses that enclosed the Jawandas’ big back lawn. Was it love when somebody filled a space in your life that yawned inside you, once they had gone? 'I did love laughing', thought Parminder. 'I really miss laughing.' And it was the memory of laughter that, at last, made the tears flow from her eyes. They trickled down her nose and into her coffee, where they made little bullet holes, swiftly erased. She was crying because she never seemed to laugh any more (...).