Andrew Miller Quotes

She knows about men, knows a good deal of the world's character. But it is hard, whatever you have endured, to give up on love. Hard to stop thinking of it as a home you might one day find again. More than hard.

Like everyone else in the house, she suffers from dreams.

And yet, in terms of its emotive potential, I still find art more attractive, currently, than books, which fail at a deeper level.

If the trees and the plants are brothers, if the birds are my sisters, then cats are truly my kin.

Can a cat be the true love of a human's life? The one great and enduring emotional connection?

I'm going to play,' says Armand, lacing his fingers and cracking the knuckles. 'A pair of these lads can pump for me.'
'Is this a time for playing?' asks Jean Baptiste. Then, 'You are right. You have never been more so.

Art, I subsequently realised, is like that. It softens by association and implication. It renders the hard pliable. It creates gaps, gaping holes really, in possibility.

Why did the reindeer fly over the mountain? Answer: Because he couldn't fly under it.

Could he not go to hospital?' asks Jean-Baptiste.
The doctor flares his nostrils. 'Hospitals are very dangerous places. Particularly to one already weakened by illness.

All of the books, all of them, stay within the same place, the same realm. I read and read and read and I don't find anything that even considers what actually happened to us.

The last summer of his life he sat hours together on the old chintz-covered swing-bed in front of the willow tree, chain-smoking Woodbines and watching the shadows flood the lawn until they swallowed him and only the tip of his ciggarette still showed, a faint red pulse. How she had longed to bring him in, to rescue him as he had rescued his sergeant. Her mother wasn't up to it, sitting all day in the kitchen listening to Alma Cogan and Ronnie Hilton on the wireless, biting her nails until they bled. So, it was she who had gone, crossing the lawn at dusk to stand in front of him, waiting for the right words to come into her head, for a dove that would bring her the gift of speech. But nothing came, and he had gazed at her through the smoke of his ciggarette as though from the far side of a pane of glass. He felt sorry for her perhaps, knowing why she had come out, knowing the impossibility of it. But instead of saying, sit down beside me Alice, sit down, daughter, and we will try to understand together the unbearable truth that love is not always enough, that people cannot always be brought back in, he had said, very conservatively, as though in reference to a discussion he had been having with her in his head for weeks, 'They used flame-throwers, you know'. And she had nodded, yes, Daddy, and left him, and gone to her room, and pushed her face into the pillow and bawled. Because she should have done it, should have, and she had failed.

The poverty of the villages is almost picturesque from the windows of a coach that is not stopping.

Control is an advertising concept.

We are, after all, human. There is something wild in those opposable thumbs.

First ambitions are best. We are less brave later.

The visit, like all visits home for a long time now, has been an obscure failure. When is it we cease to be able to go back, truly go back? What secret door is it that closes?

Sometimes the heart demands.

It's not about fucking," she asserted as we clucked nervously over her diagram. "It's about our species. We need to breed.