From Michael Bracewell‘s Unfinished Business (2023), page 2.
An Englishman Without Qualities
Category Archives: Quotes
Everyone Sounds Like an Asshole in French
“I sound like an asshole in French. To be fair, everyone sounds like an asshole in French.”
– James Greer, Bad Eminence, 2022
What it Was Like to be Potential
“He wanted to remember what it was like to be potential.”
– Lavinia Greenlaw, An Irresponsible Age, 2006
His Idea of Himself
“The coherence of Jacob the glimpsed stranger broke down and she saw in his image what she had never seen in his presence: his struggle to become and remain his idea of himself.”
– Lavinia Greenlaw, An Irresponsible Age, 2006
The Same Way Anyway
“So much of life felt like bidding a tearful goodbye to someone then realising you were both walking the same way anyway.”
– Luke Kennard, The Answer to Everything (2021)
It Can At Least Be Destroyed
“If the world cannot be made beautiful, it can at least be destroyed.”
– Len Gutkin, Dandyism: Forming Fiction from Modernism to the Present (2020)
You’d be Speechless
“I’d mispronounce ‘gnocchi’ and she’d avoid saying it all evening so as not to embarrass me. I would meet her eye and think: in this way I could strip you of every word you know. I’d take them like truffles and you’d say, ‘Help yourself,’ and then I’d take those too and you’d be speechless.”
– Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times (2020)
Le dernier lien
“J’ai perdu le dernier lien avec le monde dont je suis issue.”
– Annie Ernaux, Une femme (1987)
I Wanted the Before
“I didn’t want the after, or even the during: I wanted the before.”
– Claire-Louise Bennett, “I Am Love,” Gorse 2 (2014)
A Departure From Oneself
“[O]ne travels to the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the Taj Mahal in order to be transported, in order to experience an intensity of being there that is a kind of transport, a departure from oneself.”
– Steven Connor, Dream Machines, 2017
ANDREW GALLIX 