Anita Brookner Quotes (9 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Works

A Start in Life

Anita Brookner

Hotel du Lac

Anita Brookner

A Start in Life

Anita Brookner

Hotel du Lac

Anita Brookner

Anita Brookner: 9 quotes0 likes

Famous Anita Brookner Quotes

“Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.”

Anita Brookner book Hotel du Lac

Source: Hotel du Lac

“Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature”

Anita Brookner A Start in Life

Source: A Start in Life

“It was, I saw, a flat to get out of rather than one to stay in. It was a machine for eating and sleeping in, a suitable dwelling place for a working woman, whose main interest is in her work. I disliked this version of myself, which seemed to negate my other activities, reduced them to after-hours amusements, whereas I had always thought them pretty central. These mute, white walls had been silent witnesses to many encounters; nevertheless, they withheld comment, and their very withholding struck me as unfriendly. Unheimlich was the word which came to mind when I stood on the threshold of my bedroom.”

Anita Brookner

A Friend From England (1987)

“And yet she had never felt so bereft, as if her presence in other lives were entirely illusory, as if she herself were a kind of facsimile, pleasant but inauthentic. Before she got too old she must wrest some part of her life for herself, or she would fade, vanish, before anyone noticed her disappearance”

Anita Brookner

A Closed Eye (1991)

“It is best to marry for purely selfish reasons.”

Anita Brookner A Start in Life

A Start in Life (1981)

“I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world's tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present, and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state "I hurt" or "I hate" or "I want." Or, indeed, "Look at me." And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory.”

Anita Brookner

Look At Me (1983)

“Women have come a long way, of course: we can all be left alone at night now. But sometimes it seems a high price to pay. We can also open the door cheerfully to strangers at any hour, deal with obscene telephone calls and mend fuses.”

Anita Brookner

A Friend From England (1987)

“In the street the rain was little more than a fine mist which softened the outlines of the houses and even lent a touch of poetry to a neighbourhood unlikely to evoke tender emotions. He raised his eyes to a roofline bristling with television aerials, lowered them again to windows still blank before the evening lights were lit.”

Anita Brookner

Making Things Better (2002)

“The house - a substantial but essentially modest suburban villa - was furnished with voluptuous grandeur in approximations of various styles, predominantly those of several Louis, with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century additions. Heavy coloured glass ashtrays of monstrous size and weight rested in inlaid marquetry tables of vaguely Pompadour associations. At dinner we drank champagne from ruby Bohemian glasses: the meat was carved at a Boulle-type sideboard. ‘Regency’ wallpaper of dark green and lighter green stripes was partially covered by gilt-framed landscapes of no style whatsoever.”

Anita Brookner

A Friend From England (1987)

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