Brian Moore Quotes

O, she said, a woman in love can't afford to be proud. He must be made to see, he must be made to come back. And I must do it myself, no matter how silly it looks.

The world's made up of individuals who don't want to be heroes.

There comes a point in many people's lives when they can no longer play the role they have chosen for themselves. When that happens, we are like actors finding that someone has changed the play.

Love isn't an act, it's a whole life.
It's staying with [them] now because [they] need you; it's knowing you ... will still care about each other when sex and daydreams, fights and futures - when all that's on the shelf and done with.

When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you.

After a goalless first half, the score at half time is 0-0.

Love isn't an act, it's a whole life.

For it was important to have things to tell which interested your friends. And Miss Hearne had always been able to find interesting happenings where other people would find only dullness. It was, she often felt, a gift which was one of the great rewards of a solitary life. And a necessary gift. Because, when you were a single girl, you had to find interesting things to talk about. Other women always had their children and shopping and running a house to chat about. Besides which, their husbands often told them interesting stories. But a single girl was in a different position. People simply didn't want to hear how she managed things like accommodation and budgets. She had to find other subjects and other subjects were mostly other people. So people she knew, people she had heard of, people she saw in the street, people she had read about, they all had to be collected and gone through like a basket of sewing so that the most interesting bits about them could be picked out and fitted together to make conversation.

The silent majority distrusts people who believe in causes.

He was a horrid-looking fellow. Fat as a pig he was, and his face was the colour of cottage cheese. His collar was unbuttoned and his silk tie was spotted with egg stain. His stomach stuck out like a sagging pillow and his little thin legs fell away under it to end in torn felt slippers. He was all bristly blond jowls, tiny puffy hands and long blond curly hair, like some monstrous baby swelled to man size.

And the bell jangled, the driver started. The bus whirled off, to the last stop, the lonely room, the lonely night.

And maybe, although it was a thing you could hardly bear to think about, like death or your last judgment, maybe he would be the last one ever and he would walk away now and it would only be a question of waiting for it all to end and hoping for better things in the next world. But that was silly, it was never too late.

When a thing is told to you and you can't remember it happening it doesn't count somehow. It is as though it had nothing to do with you. Remembering, that's what counts.

She watched the glass, a plain woman, changing all to the delightful illusion of beauty. There was still time: for her ugliness was destined to bloom late, hidden first by the unformed gawkiness of youth, budding to plainness in young womanhood and now flowering to slow maturity in her early forties, it still awaited the subtle garishness which only decay could bring to fruition: a garishness which, when arrived at, would preclude all efforts at the mirror game.