Linda Grant Quotes & Sayings

I was embarrassed by my parents. I thought they had nothing of interest to say or contribute to anything. My real crime was not understanding that they were interesting, and I have been trying to make it up to them for being so indescribably blase, so genuinely uninterested and dismissive. — Linda Grant

When I was in my 20s in the 1970s, I read all of Jean Rhys. I have reread very little since because the first impressions were so powerful they have stayed with me. — Linda Grant

And your neihjbour is sitting next door weeping as she watches her child facing a crowd of Palestiniankids armed with rocks which could take your boy's eye out or give him brain damage if god forbids he took off his helmet one of those dusty stones hit him in the head — Linda Grant

I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went o r you didn't, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents. — Linda Grant

The relationship with my library on a Kindle feels more intimate, like a shelled animal carrying its home on its back. — Linda Grant

Alone, dying alone. Sentence after apparently unremarkable sentence pass until suddenly I feel myself hit in the solar plexus by the accumulated tension. I look back and ask, How did you do that? I return in memory — Linda Grant

How can life end in the middle of the story? Because life always does. — Linda Grant

There are not enough books here. The sight of the bare shelves shames me. What have I done? — Linda Grant

Without a physical presence on the shelves, the Kindle books seemed slightly insubstantial. There was no equivalent of the satisfying cracked spine. There was nothing to bequeath to the next generation, nothing to sell on to live a new life in someone else's library. But at least the torrent of books that kept arriving had slowed down and there was space to walk up the stairs. I was being freed from the burden of all those bloody books. — Linda Grant

A new dress. Is this all it takes to make a new beginning, this shred of dyed cloth, shaped into the form of a woman's body? — Linda Grant

Lord Malquist and Mr Moon was the literary equivalent of the Wonderbra for intellectually pretentious students of the seventies. — Linda Grant

I threw one box in the recycling bin. I'm going to hell, a hell in which eternity is a Kindle with a dead battery. — Linda Grant

Revenge is so much more satisfying than regret. — Linda Grant

The legacy of women's war work is our present post-industrial employment structure. It was the war that created the demand for a technologically advanced, de-skilled, low-paid, non-unionized female workforce and paved the way for making part-time work the norm for married women now. A generation later, it was the daughters of wartime women workers who completed their mothers' campaign for equal pay. — Linda Grant

I'm not shy, not reclusive, not any of those things, but the idea of a day in front of me when I have nothing to do, is just, oh what pleasure! — Linda Grant

What is the death of a soldier even off duty of an occupying army walking in an occupied territory against the death of a little boy screaming in terror in his father's arms Where is the equivalence — Linda Grant

I was overly-familiar with chairs that flew, with wardrobes that led to snowy woods, and holes in the ground with hobbits in them. — Linda Grant

I am not by any stretch of the imagination a tidy person, and the piles of unread books on the coffee table and by my bed have a plaintive, pleading quality to me - 'Read me, please!' — Linda Grant

I'm a really hectic dreamer; I never wake up not out of a dream, and there's loads going on, lots of action, big blockbuster dreams, they're all major enterprises. — Linda Grant

It's not the punch you expect that knocks you down. — Linda Grant

Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography. — Linda Grant

When I look at my books I feel like Alice in the closing pages of Wonderland, when the cards all rise up and overwhelm her. — Linda Grant

It became obvious to me that the generation who changed the world were my parents' generation, and not only in terms of the Second World War, but if you look at all the social legislation of the '60s - abortion, homosexual law reform, equal pay - it wasn't done by my generation; it was done by people who were adults. — Linda Grant

Pain itself, as a pure experience, is something different from the anxiety attached to it. — Linda Grant

Marriages last because the people in them want to be married — Linda Grant

When I was 20 I was immensely proud of the rows of grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics in my bookcase. — Linda Grant

The clothes you wear are a metamorphosis. They change you from the outside in. — Linda Grant

The idea that I was building a library to bequeath to the next generation is one of the greatest fallacies of my life. — Linda Grant

Times were very hard if you were a poor, politically correct Jewish girl living in the east end of London during the Blitz and you were trying to eke out a living as a hairdresser. — Linda Grant

Crave the small, tactile simplicity of my new Kindle Paperwhite in its purple leather cover, which is currently home to what would make up around three boxes of physical books, but whose screen's digital imprint is flattened of all memory and association. It's soulless and almost weightless. — Linda Grant

Books are too personal as objects to be displayed, in case a potential buyer is put off by your taste for Nietzsche or Marian Keyes. You would not display the contents of your knicker and sock drawer, or your bathroom cabinet with its face creams and cough remedies, so why put off potential buyers with your taste in literature? — Linda Grant

There is probably no finer prose writer alive in Britain now, no-one better at making a sentence, no-one better at descriptive writing, no-one who can get so close to the vividness of other peoples interior selves. — Linda Grant

When I was a child, on Sunday mornings the family would assemble around the blue-leather-covered gramophone to listen to records. — Linda Grant

Who destroys books? Cities, churches, dictators and fanatics. Their fingers itch to build a pyre and strike the match. On 10 May 1933, students gathered in Berlin to dance around a bonfire of 25,000 volumes of 'un-German' books. They burned, amongst many others, Bertolt Brecht, Otto Dix, Heinrich Heine, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and H.G. Wells. They destroyed them because the contents were too dangerous. — Linda Grant

Many of us, whether in the jungles of Asia or on the streets of Chicago, had discovered that noble causes can lead to ignoble actions and that we were capable of sacrificing honor to a sense of efficacy. — Linda Grant

They are books that have been read and read intensely. They are knocked about and shopworn. I would be ashamed of a book whose spine was not broken. — Linda Grant