Tessa Hadley Quotes & Sayings

The present was always paramount, in a way that thrust you forward: empty, but also free. Whatever stories you told over to yourself and others, you were in truth exposed and naked in the present, a prow cleaving new waters; your past was insubstantial behind, it fell away, it grew into desuetude, its forms grew obsolete. The problem was, you were always still alive, until the end. You had to do something. — Tessa Hadley

I hate to think of you stuck here all day every day, doing nothing with that brilliant brain of yours."
"It never was brilliant. Anyway, who keeps these books to see who's used themselves wisely and who's wasted? — Tessa Hadley

But now everything was lost: all the scattered effect of a real person, complicated beyond counting. (Post production, 197) — Tessa Hadley

We're wedged tight into the accident of our moment in history. — Tessa Hadley

She imagined the reading she did now as like climbing inside one of those deep old beds she'd seen in a museum, with a sliding door to close behind you: even as she was suffering with a book and could hardly bear it, felt as if her heart would crack with emotion or with outrage at injustice, the act of reading it enclosed and saved her. Sometimes when she moved back out of the book and into her own life, just for a moment she could see her circumstances with a new interest and clarity, as if they were happening to someone else. — Tessa Hadley

Andy was receptive, like a deep vessel into which life was poured. If this terrible particular thing hadn't been poured into her, she would have been happier
it goes without saying
but less of a person. She was filled out by her fate. I actually think that this is quite rare, the capacity to become the whole shape of the accidents that happen to you. — Tessa Hadley

Once they had been equal in their separate freedoms. They had set out to have children as lightly as if they were playing house, and now her necessarily domestic life bored him, and she was bound to it in her body and imagination. This imbalance was fated, built into their biology. — Tessa Hadley

The gracious thing to do was to accept the beauty of the opportunity if it was given — Tessa Hadley

I'm really all right, she would think, carefully, lightly, as she pulled the key from the ignition, trying not to examine the sensation too closely or lose it with any sudden movement, as if it were a thin-filmed shiny bubble poised in her chest. — Tessa Hadley

But she wasn't in love, though she had been ready to be. Love sank down gently from where it had been swollen in expectation
she imagined a red balloon deflating to a foolish remnant. (In the cave, 171) — Tessa Hadley

Ally wasn't disappointed in the writers: she hadn't expected anything from them in the first place; it hadn't occurred to her to be interested in writers as individuals beyond their work. To her relief no one whose books she'd read ever came to the centre, although sometimes she had to pretend to have read the writers who did. The writers could be fairly crazy, too; you had to be vigilant not to trip over their vanity or anxiety. Luckily, most of her favourites were dead. (She's the one, 151) — Tessa Hadley

What use was her grown-up knowledge
acquired through such initiations, at such risk
in this world of infants, who had to be kept safe? — Tessa Hadley

And that was true too, that was what the Culverts were like: crucified by their shyness and at the same time contemptuous of the world of ordinary people they couldn't talk to. — Tessa Hadley