Linda Grant Quotes

Pain itself, as a pure experience, is something different from the anxiety attached to it.

I threw one box in the recycling bin. I'm going to hell, a hell in which eternity is a Kindle with a dead battery.

I am not by any stretch of the imagination a tidy person, and the piles of unread books on the coffee table and by my bed have a plaintive, pleading quality to me - 'Read me, please!'

Times were very hard if you were a poor, politically correct Jewish girl living in the east end of London during the Blitz and you were trying to eke out a living as a hairdresser.

The clothes you wear are a metamorphosis. They change you from the outside in.

They are books that have been read and read intensely. They are knocked about and shopworn. I would be ashamed of a book whose spine was not broken.

When I look at my books I feel like Alice in the closing pages of Wonderland, when the cards all rise up and overwhelm her.

The relationship with my library on a Kindle feels more intimate, like a shelled animal carrying its home on its back.

I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went o r you didn't, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.

The legacy of women's war work is our present post-industrial employment structure. It was the war that created the demand for a technologically advanced, de-skilled, low-paid, non-unionized female workforce and paved the way for making part-time work the norm for married women now. A generation later, it was the daughters of wartime women workers who completed their mothers' campaign for equal pay.

Revenge is so much more satisfying than regret.

Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography.

I was embarrassed by my parents. I thought they had nothing of interest to say or contribute to anything. My real crime was not understanding that they were interesting, and I have been trying to make it up to them for being so indescribably blase, so genuinely uninterested and dismissive.

It's not the punch you expect that knocks you down.

Marriages last because the people in them want to be married

When I was 20 I was immensely proud of the rows of grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics in my bookcase.

I'm a really hectic dreamer; I never wake up not out of a dream, and there's loads going on, lots of action, big blockbuster dreams, they're all major enterprises.

Many of us, whether in the jungles of Asia or on the streets of Chicago, had discovered that noble causes can lead to ignoble actions and that we were capable of sacrificing honor to a sense of efficacy.

When I was a child, on Sunday mornings the family would assemble around the blue-leather-covered gramophone to listen to records.

Books are too personal as objects to be displayed, in case a potential buyer is put off by your taste for Nietzsche or Marian Keyes. You would not display the contents of your knicker and sock drawer, or your bathroom cabinet with its face creams and cough remedies, so why put off potential buyers with your taste in literature?

And your neihjbour is sitting next door weeping as she watches her child facing a crowd of Palestiniankids armed with rocks which could take your boy's eye out or give him brain damage if god forbids he took off his helmet one of those dusty stones hit him in the head

There are not enough books here. The sight of the bare shelves shames me. What have I done?

Lord Malquist and Mr Moon was the literary equivalent of the Wonderbra for intellectually pretentious students of the seventies.

Who destroys books? Cities, churches, dictators and fanatics. Their fingers itch to build a pyre and strike the match. On 10 May 1933, students gathered in Berlin to dance around a bonfire of 25,000 volumes of 'un-German' books. They burned, amongst many others, Bertolt Brecht, Otto Dix, Heinrich Heine, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and H.G. Wells. They destroyed them because the contents were too dangerous.

When I was in my 20s in the 1970s, I read all of Jean Rhys. I have reread very little since because the first impressions were so powerful they have stayed with me.

Alone, dying alone. Sentence after apparently unremarkable sentence pass until suddenly I feel myself hit in the solar plexus by the accumulated tension. I look back and ask, How did you do that? I return in memory