Amanda Craig Quotes & Sayings

To thoughtful natures, events are like depth charges: the surface is calm, but the shock spreads further. — Amanda Craig

Mostly, what people mean by love is laziness. — Amanda Craig

I'll tell you the difference between our countries. Americans think life is serious but not hopeless; the English that life is hopeless but not serious. — Amanda Craig

People who love reading are often called bookworms - but that's the wrong way around. It's not you that worms into a book; it's books that worm into you." - Amanda Craig — Amanda Craig

It's not by accident that people talk of a state of confusion as not being able to see the wood for the trees, or of being out of the woods when some crisis is surmopunted. It is a place of loss, confusion, terror and anger, a place where you can, like Dante, find yourself going down into Hell. But if it's any comfort, the dark wood isn't just that. It's also a place of opportunity and adventure. It is the place in which fortunes can be reversed, hearts mended, hopes reborn. — Amanda Craig

But this city is a world of its own, a country within a country. People are used to taking the old and making it news; and used, too, to taking the new and making it old. Every glass of water from its taps, it is said, has passed six times through the kidneys of another, and every scrap of its land has been trodden on, fought over, dug up and broken down for centuries. — Amanda Craig

All age is a kind of tiredness, I think. When you're young, the lines never show. Every morning you wake unmarked, wiped clear by sleep. One day, though, you see lines that itch, as though some crumb of existence has been creased into your skin. They can never be smoothed away, and after a while you forget that this heavy, irritable feeling wasn't always there. — Amanda Craig

I had been much more in love with my wife than she with me, that was all. Somehow, you were supposed to be ashamed of this, as though love were a perpetual jostling for the roles of pursuer and pursued. As if it didn't take more courage to admit that someone held your hopes of happiness in their hands. As if it were a choice. — Amanda Craig

Each morning the light came through the slats of the shutters in ripples, and as it washed towards the inhabitants of the Casa Luna it smoothed away memories of the past, It was for this that they had endured long hours in the grey English winter or freezing American climes, for this that they had worked and planned and worked extra hours/ The horrible feelings of stress, tension, anger and frustration that coursed through their veins every day almost unnoticed began to fade. — Amanda Craig

The sudden acquisition of power does not go to the head, but to the groin. In some, it promotes lust; in others, supplants it. Those on whom its effect is purely cerebral may indeed be counted as fortunate. — Amanda Craig

It's the remarkable thing about academics: they look at Shakespeare and always see their own faces in him. — Amanda Craig

I am a Jewish mother. My dying words will be, "Put a jumper on — Amanda Craig

There was a certain usefulness in having a husband whom most people could barely tolerate: it deflected envy, for one thing. — Amanda Craig

Familiarity breeds sentiment before contempt. — Amanda Craig

That is the worst thing about despair: it is not constant, any more than love is. — Amanda Craig

You know the only rule you need to know to get on in this country? 'Never complain, never explain. — Amanda Craig

Very happy or unhappy, people disappear. — Amanda Craig

He had heard the voice of London that lives and breathes beneath the rumble of traffic, a voice like the continual high-pitched shriek you hear when you put your head beneath the waves of the sea. It is the sound of millions and millions of creatures living and struggling and dying and being born. It commands those who hear it to eat or be eaten.. — Amanda Craig

Polly was all too aware that much of her time on holiday would be spent doing the laundry and the cooking and the child-care and all the other chores that back in London would be shared with her cleaning lady. A holiday with Theo and the children represented two weeks of domestic and maternal drudgery. — Amanda Craig

I've noticed that whenever institutions claim to be confident of anything it means the complete opposite. — Amanda Craig

Some people, perhaps those with more dignity and less rage gnawing at the roots of their being, are nicer as failures, For me, it was like descending a deep pit that had no bottom — Amanda Craig

Every profession is an island whose inhabitants earn a precarious living by taking in each other's washing. — Amanda Craig

Not every child takes instantly to books like a duck to water, but I don't believe there are children who hate books. There are just children who haven't yet found the right books for them. — Amanda Craig

If you read fairy tales carefully, you'll notice they are mostly about people who aren't heroes. They don't have special powers, or gifts. Often they are despised as stupid, They are bullied, beaten up, robbed, starved. But they find they are stronger than their misfortunes. — Amanda Craig

The idea that any of their offspring could possibly be accused of involvement in criminal activities caused deep offence, even to parents who believed that property was theft. — Amanda Craig

As ever, Morpurgo's warmth and humanity suffuse a story of courage, love and hope. — Amanda Craig

All paradises are there to be expelled from. — Amanda Craig

They might watch American movies, wear American clothes, even read American books but Bush and the Iraq War have made actual American people social lepers; she only has to open her mouth in some places to feel a wave of loathing directed at her. Katie is weary of pointing out that at least half her countrymen detest their President even more than Europe does, but it's no good. — Amanda Craig

What frightened me most was, I could no longer believe in my own life as a story. Everyone needs a story, a part to play in order to avoid the realization that life is without significance. How else do any of us survive? It's what makes life bearable, even interesting. When it becomes neither, people say you've lost the plot. Or just lost it. — Amanda Craig