Inspirational Quotes by Andrew Miller

“First ambitions are best. We are less brave later.”

“Like everyone else in the house, she suffers from dreams.”

“She knows about men, knows a good deal of the world's character. But it is hard, whatever you have endured, to give up on love. Hard to stop thinking of it as a home you might one day find again. More than hard.”

“The poverty of the villages is almost picturesque from the windows of a coach that is not stopping.”

“But we weren't meant to live alone,' said Frank. 'Life makes its own corrections.”

“The visit, like all visits home for a long time now, has been an obscure failure. When is it we cease to be able to go back, truly go back? What secret door is it that closes?”

“Why are there no handsome priest in Paris? One has no inclination to confess anything to an ugly man.”

“I’m going to play,’ says Armand, lacing his fingers and cracking the knuckles. ‘A pair of these lads can pump for me.’ ‘Is this a time for playing?’ asks Jean Baptiste. Then, ‘You are right. You have never been more so.”

“Could he not go to hospital?' asks Jean-Baptiste. The doctor flares his nostrils. 'Hospitals are very dangerous places. Particularly to one already weakened by illness.”

“Why did the reindeer fly over the mountain? Answer: Because he couldn't fly under it.”

“Proshka was a man of self-esteem. He considered himself a cut above the rest, and had a degree of personal pride. His spell in prison was a humiliating experience for him. No longer could he strut with pride before his fellows, and his spirits sank at once. Proshka went home from prison embittered not so much against Pyotr Nikolayevich as against the whole world. Everyone said the same thing: after he came out of prison, Proshka went to pieces. He grew too lazy to work, took to drink, and was soon caught stealing clothes from the trademan's wife. Once again he ended up in prison.”

“Everywhere women were insulted with impunity, insulted by men. If a few of them suffered for their insolence as the overseer had, it might be no more than they deserved.”

“The last summer of his life he sat hours together on the old chintz-covered swing-bed in front of the willow tree, chain-smoking Woodbines and watching the shadows flood the lawn until they swallowed him and only the tip of his ciggarette still showed, a faint red pulse. How she had longed to bring him in, to rescue him as he had rescued his sergeant. Her mother wasn't up to it, sitting all day in the kitchen listening to Alma Cogan and Ronnie Hilton on the wireless, biting her nails until they bled. So, it was she who had gone, crossing the lawn at dusk to stand in front of him, waiting for the right words to come into her head, for a dove that would bring her the gift of speech. But nothing came, and he had gazed at her through the smoke of his ciggarette as though from the far side of a pane of glass. He felt sorry for her perhaps, knowing why she had come out, knowing the impossibility of it. But instead of saying, sit down beside me Alice, sit down, daughter, and we will try to understand together the unbearable truth that love is not always enough, that people cannot always be brought back in, he had said, very conservatively, as though in reference to a discussion he had been having with her in his head for weeks, 'They used flame-throwers, you know'. And she had nodded, yes, Daddy, and left him, and gone to her room, and pushed her face into the pillow and bawled. Because she should have done it, should have, and she had failed.”

“only elevenpence in the shilling.”

“Open the doors, the Russians say, here comes trouble. On”

“You can borrow my Blackbird, if you like,' said Ben. This was his new fountain pen, which troubled him. It was guaranteed not to leak, but writers and schoolchildren knew better. Ben wished to be relieved of the responsibility of the Blackbird, without losing his own dignity.”

“the wit.’ The Reverend”

“polyglot, attempts to draw them into conversation.”

“Now he learns that time trails men like a killer,thorough, even-handed, collecting the evidence of the years. Nothing is lost.”