“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
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 role - grateful for the frisson of importance that comes with receiving important information. In recent years, however, I have noticed that my gratification is becoming diluted by a certain weary indignation. They tell me because… — Zoë Heller Copy Share
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 about the nature of the universe. It was all nonsense. Her tears had been no different from the ones people cried at sentimental television commercials. They represented nothing but a momentary and regrettable submission to kitsch.” — Zoe Heller Copy Share
“Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists - reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself… — Zoë Heller Copy Share
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 Dowell that it is a novelist's business to make a reader 'see things clearly', his interest in clarity had little to do with simplicity. There is no 'getting to the bottom of things', no triumphant answers… — Zoë Heller Copy Share
“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, haven’t you?’ approach to religious occasions. As a young man, I often goaded my believing friends with crudely logical questions… — Zoe Heller Copy Share
