Victoria Clayton Quotes

The man who tells you nothing frightens him is whistling in the dark. Besides, fear is not necessarily bad. It may guard you from harm. And I suspect that fear of being caught, punished and disgraced keeps many more of us from committing crimes than does the voice of conscience'.

It's hard to say why with some people you could talk all day and all night, while with others it's a struggle to find enough to say during a single course at dinner.

Life is a merciless bully for children born into circumstances of grinding poverty, to unhappy families broken apart by crime, drugs, alcohol. It brutalises the affections, cramps the intellect, destroys aspiration.

What a pity, I reflected, that honesty in human relations is so rarely possible. We are compelled to approach, circle and retreat as though performing the steps of a complicated dance, neither trusting the appearance of truth not daring to speak it.

Cordelia glared at me. 'I expect if someone strapped you to table an swung an axe over your naked quivering flesh like The Pit and the Pendulum, you'd be correcting his grammar'.

The search for identity in one's youth is a journey of alternate boredom and agony interrupted by flash of joy.

It is frightening to feel that all your happiness is bound up to another person. That without them you don't - you don't particularly want to live'.

But with Freddy I seemed to have the best sort of conversations, where our talk became exploratory and would lead on to new ideas, like thinking aloud, and in the process of clarifying improvisatory theories I always made useful discoveries about what I thought and felt.

My mother had not acted for ten years. Not since a reviewer wrote that her portrayal of Lady Macbeth put him in mind of an exasperated society hostess burdened with unmannerly guests who had lost the new tennis balls, left the bathrooms in a mess, and finished the gin.

I found bossing other people about such a delightful novelty that I had to remind myself of Lord Acton's famous axiom about its tendency to corrupt.

At parties I tend to get analytical, observing people rather than joining in'.

There is nothing sexual about my interest in other women's breasts. But it's difficult not be curious when you have next to none of your own.

An unhappy ending makes it literature rather than romantic fiction.

This is the worst day of my life'. I groaned and put my head in my hands.
'You can't possibly know that. You might have something really awful going to happen to you later on. All your children burned to death or your nose cut off in a revolving door'.

I think there is nothing more completely beautiful and more beautifully complete than walls lined with well-arranged books.

Such meticulousness was touching, as though Maggie poured into the house all the tenderness that was rebuffed by those she lived with.

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