The collection / 35 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1959 AD

I’ve noticed that whenever institutions claim to be confident of anything it means the complete opposite.

Amanda Craig / quote

02c. 1959 AD

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 / quote

03c. 1959 AD

All paradises are there to be expelled from.

Amanda Craig / quote

04c. 1959 AD

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 / quote

05c. 1959 AD

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 / quote

06c. 1959 AD

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 / quote

07c. 1959 AD

Hatred bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Amanda Craig / quote

08c. 1959 AD

I knew exactly when the fever had struck. I had been reading Hamlet in an English class at school. Everyone else stumbled, puzzling over the strange words. Then it had been my turn, and the language had suddenly woken in me, so that my heart and lungs and tongue and throat were on fire. Later, I understood that this was why people spoke of Shakespeare as a god. At the time, I felt like weeping. Somebody had released me from dumbness, from utter isolation. I knew that I could live inside these words, that they would give me a a shape, a shell. I had no idea, then, that I would never play Hamlet…. I’m an actor, and in a good year I earn eleven thousand pounds for dressing up as a carrot.

Amanda Craig / quote

09c. 1959 AD

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

Amanda Craig / quote

10c. 1959 AD

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

Amanda Craig / quote

11c. 1959 AD

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 / quote