Lisa Halliday Quotes

That I didn't see the end of me and Maddie coming seems impossible to me now. But at the time I had this notion that even though my own feelings for my girlfriend had begun to cool not long after the spectacular prize of her was attained, to part ways on this basis would be as much an act of infidelity toward myself. It unsettled me that the Amar of a year ago could be so inconsistent with the Amar of today, and I suppose that in my determination to pretend, at least, that nothing had changed - that I was not so fickle and vain as to want a woman only until she had been won - I did not sufficiently entertain the possibility that Maddie herself was capable of changing, too.

A young friend of mine has written a rather surprising little novel about this; about in its way. About the extent to which we're able to penetrate the looking-glass and imagine a life, indeed a consciousness, that goes some way to reduce the blind spots in our own. It's a novel that on the surface would seem to have nothing to do with its author, but in fact is a kind of veiled portrait of someone determined to transcend her provenance, her privilege, her naivete.

We ride too high on deceptive notions of power and security and control and then when it all comes crashing down on us the low is made deeper by the high. By its precipitousness, but also by the humiliation you feel for having failed to see the plummet coming. . . . Lulled by years of relative peace and prosperity we settle into micromanaging our lives with our fancy technologies and custom interest rates and eleven different kinds of milk, and this leads to a certain inwardness, an unchecked narrowing of perspective, the vague expectation that even if we don't earn them and nurture them the truly essential amenities will endure forever as they are. We trust that someone else is looking after the civil liberties shop, so we don't have to. Our military might is unmatched and in any case the madness is at least an ocean away. And then all of a sudden we look up from ordering paper towels online to find ourselves delivered right into the madness. And we wonder: How did this happen? What was I doing when this was in the works? Is it too late to think about it now? . . .

… I was constantly trying to shoehorn characters into each other's lives, planting them on street corners or in cafés together so that they could talk. So that they could explain things to each other, from across the great human divide. But it was all so contrived. Contrived and meddlesome, really, because sometimes you just have to let your characters get on with it, which is to say coexist. If their paths cross and they can teach each other something, fine. If they don't, well, that's interesting, too. Or, if it isn't interesting, then maybe you need to back up and start again.

I felt in London the way you do when you take one step too many at the bottom of a flight of stairs: brought up short by the unexpected plateau and its dull, unyielding thud.

I pointed out that the very proliferation of pseudo journalism these days, the cacophony of conjecture and partisan agendas and sensationalism that seem orchestrated above all to provoke and entertain, tended to leave me feeling as though I know less than ever what my government is doing in my name. Drinking, Alistair shrugged and nodded as if to concede: Yes, well, there's always the moronic inferno.