“Empty minds are abhorred by thought as vacuums are by nature.”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“The safest way to live is first, inherit money, second be born without a taste for liquor, third, have a legitimate job that keeps you busy, fourth, marry a wife who will cooperate in your sexual peculiarities, fifth, join some big church, sixth, don't live too long.”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“Love is about allowing. Love is about letting people be free. You leave the cage door open and if you're really loved, the bird flies back to be with you. That's the only kind of love worth having.”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“Evil was a stupid word. It had the same sort of sense, largely meaningless, amorphous, diffuse, wooly, as applied to "love." Everyone had a vague idea of what it meant but none could precisely have defined it. It seemed, in a way, to imply something supernatural.”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“But it was more than that. There was an indefinable ingredient, a kind of excitement. It had something to do with history and the past, that excitement, and something to do with potential as well, with what Orwell or somebody had said. that every man really knew in his heart the finest place to be was the countryside on a summer's day. I was happy, that's what it was.”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“Mark Twain had written somewhere: We are all mad at night.”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“Events in his own past he never thought of as evil but rather as mistaken, immensely regrettable, brought about by fear and greed.”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“Time, the best of all doctors, though it kills you in the end, had done more than therapy could.”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“Lewis would have agreed with Oscar Wilde that our past is what we are. We cannot rid ourselves of it.”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“The wonderful thing about the human mind is the way it copes when the worst happens. Beyond that worst happening you think there can be nothing, the unimaginable has taken place, and on the other side is death, destruction, the end. But the worst happens and you reel from it, you stagger, the shock is enormous, and then you begin to recover. You rally, you stand up and face it. You get used to it.
For what had happen was not the worst, you realize that. the worst was yet to come, was perhaps always yet to come, never would actually come, because if it did, you would know it, that would be reality, and there would be nothing then but to kill yourself. Quickly.”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“A disturbing experience it had been, exciting and confusing.”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“We are all mad at three in the morning”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“Those who have inside their lives an empty space need to fill it with love if they can, and if they cannot, with things. And they need to please others in order that others may give them love. Those who need love with the hunger the rest of mankind keeps for food, for the necessaries of life, give their bodies simply and without reflection for a return of love, would give their soul if they knew how, are reduced to thievery of the basest kind and of the basest things because this is the easiest way.”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“I am not in this world to live up to your expectations and you are not in this world to live up to mine. I am I and you are you. And if we find each other that's beautiful, if not, it can't be helped.”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“Games were being played, that was all, and games of which he was largely ignorant and wished to remain so.”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“Life is too short to be so circumspect.”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“I think life's too long to do anything that we know is wrong before we begin.”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“You do not put off things because they threaten you, because you are afraid; It was a rule of life.”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“Isak Dinesen said that life is no more than a process for turning healthy young puppies into mangy old dogs and man but an exquisite instrument for converting the red wine of Shiraz into urine.”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“He thought, I know what my idea of heaven would be, if by heaven we mean a place of bliss in which to pass eternity: a sanctuary where one might chain-smoke without impairment of breathing, destruction of the lungs, or damage to the heart, light each fresh cigarette from the glowing butt of its predecessor, and drink ice-free but hundred-proof chilled vodka laced with two drops of angostura and a gill of newly opened Perrier endlessly, with increasing euphoria, until a peak of joy and ease was reached but without any subsequent nausea or pain or dehydration or oblivion…”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
“When the process began, when association started an entering procedure—at, for instance, the sound of a Greek or Spanish place name, the taste of raspberries, the sight of candles out of doors—he had taught himself to touch an escape key, rather like that on the computers he sold.”
― Barbara Vine, quote from A Fatal Inversion
Barbara Vine
Born place: in The United Kingdom
Born date February 17, 1930
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“LORD ILLINGWORTH What do you think she'd do if I kissed her?
MRS ALLONBY Either marry you, or strike you across the face with her glove. What would you do if she struck you across the face with her glove?
LORD ILLINGWORTH Fall in love with her, probably.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from A Woman of No Importance
“We think we know."
"Know? That's worse than an atom bomb, and always was.”
― William Golding, quote from Darkness Visible
“I will carry a mark on my heart for the rest of my life.”
― Jeff Wheeler, quote from The Scourge of Muirwood
“There's no science that can't be used for good or for evil. Science could be used by whoever has the power to use it and desire to use it. If you make people knowledgeable about these sciences and don't point out this fact, then you're saying, I withdraw from the battle, from the discussion of the ethics involved. I just stick to the facts. And that of course means that you've surrendered to the strongest forces. You say you're neutral in what you do, you aren't that concerned with it. If the Pentagon is using your discoveries, that's not your problem. It's unavoidable that you have some responsibility, it seems to me, regardless of what you teach or what your subject is or what your skill is. Whatever you have to contribute has a social dimension. And I think it's ineffective to try to impose that on anybody. Sharing it with them is one thing, but trying to impose it is another. You honestly say these are my ideas and I have a right to my opinion, and if I have a right to my opinion then you have a right to your opinion.
"You can't have an individual right. It has to be a universal right. I have no rights that everybody else doesn't have. There's no right I could claim that anybody else in the world can't claim, and I have to fight for their exercising that right just like I have to fight for my own. That doesn't mean I have to impose my ideas on people, but it means I have a responsibility to provide whatever light I can on the subject and share my ideas with people.”
― Myles Horton, quote from We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change
“[...] However, many books,
Wise men have said, are wearisome; who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior,
(And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek?)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys
And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge,
As children gathering pebbles on the shore.”
― John Milton, quote from Paradise Regained
Touch of Power
Labyrinth
The Snowman
An Instance of the F...
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