“I could feel Monika nudging me furiously at this point, but I refused to look at her. I wasn’t feeling particularly reverent about my mother’s deadness, or about the vicar, but I do despise that ghastly, ‘You’ve got to laugh,… — Zoe Heller Copy Share Image
It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mistery. — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
“All my life I have been the sort of person in whom people confide. And all my life I have been flattered by this… — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
It's similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you'd kill it... — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
“Music, together with certain sorts of majestic landscape, had a well-known tendency to induce such faux-sublime moments: artificial intimations of transcendent truths, grandiose hunches… — Zoe Heller Copy Share Image
“Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky… — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
For most people, honesty is such an unusual departure from their standard modus operandi - such an abherration in their workaday mendacity - that… — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
Somewhere between sanity and madness lays a fine line, for some it is a tightrope walked daily, a fight for balance to be won… — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
“But that I should have ended up in a place like this seems too custom-made a nightmare to be the work of mere ill… — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
It's hard to resist the magical thinking that the work habits of great writers are the key to their greatness. — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
“...elegance loses its power in the presence of the properly stupid...” — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
“The conclusion of Dowell's narrative offers not a resolution, so much as a plangent confirmation of complexities. While Ford would certainly have agreed with… — Zoë Heller Copy Share Image
“I could feel Monika nudging me furiously at this point, but I refused to look at her. I wasn’t feeling particularly reverent about my… — Zoe Heller Copy Share Image
