Cathedral Quote by Graham Swift

““It makes you feel sort of cheap and titchy. Like it's looking down at you, saying, I'm Canterbury Cathedral, who the hell are you?””

Graham Swift

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Cathedral

More by Graham Swift

I like the world we've got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.

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The idea of stopping is not unmeaningful to me. I think there might be a time when, in theory at least, you'd say, 'Well…

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There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on--a more reliable world in so far as it…

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My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite.

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As a novelist, I suppose I can say that I'm highly articulate. But I know, as a person, in other ways, I'm not always…

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“There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress, it doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-endingly retrieving what is lost. A dogged, vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A…

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“And books, she knew by then, were one of the necessities, the rocks of her life.”

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Structure that really pays off is all based on emotion. I don't write down an elaborate plan. It's really done by feel. It's one…

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The novel that's contemporary in the sense of being wholly 'of now' is an impossibility, if only because novels may take years to write,…

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“But this would have been to ignore the young man of only twenty-five, who, for all his, by now, increasing and debilitating proneness to…

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Literature is the voice of the human heart.

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In my work you often get an abrupt shift in time, a jolt. But the emotional logic will take the reader on. I hope.…

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Explore all 79 Graham Swift quotes

More Cathedral quotes

Whence, then, did the cathedral derive its power? Clearly here: It took back the family into the confidences of religion. It taught man and…

Jenkin Lloyd Jones

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“The sun appeared between the twin spires of the cathedral as its light reflected off the crescent and star that rose out of the dome on top of the mosque. It was beautiful, and surreal. In one instant, the bells rang out from the cathedral and if I closed my eyes then I could easily imagine that I was back…

Tucker Elliot

It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.

Robert Hughes

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“Love can be a natural endowment, a present, or a gift. If it is not just a donation, it can be a divine talent.…

Erik Pevernagie

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When I started to build this cathedral, the word on the street was that I was crazy.

Justo Gallego

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As a boy soprano in the high school choir, I later sang a solo during the carol service at Canterbury Cathedral, but I was too young to secure the Freddy Eynsford-Hill role in our production of 'My Fair Lady' - and far too timid to have thought to audition for it.

Hamish Bowles

I'm not a religious person. But, when I look at a beautiful cathedral, what brings awe, what induces awe is the idea that architecture,…

Jason Silva

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“When we look at a perfect cathedral, two different emotions emerge in us: On the one hand, the feeling of admiration for the architect…

Mehmet Murat ildan

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If it wasn't for Durham Cathedral I probably wouldn't be an architect. I was taken there when I was about seven and I couldn't…

George Clarke

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“The rooks were sailing about the cathedral towers; and the towers themselves, overlooking many a long unaltered mile of the rich country and its pleasant streams, were cutting the bright morning air as if there were no such thing as change on earth. Yet the bells, when they sounded told me sorrowfully of change in everything; told me of their…

Charles Dickens