Tessa Hadley Quotes

#1. I hate to think of you stuck here all day every day, doing nothing with that brilliant brain of yours."
"It never was brilliant. Anyway, who keeps these books to see who's used themselves wisely and who's wasted?

Tessa Hadley

#2. But she wasn't in love, though she had been ready to be. Love sank down gently from where it had been swollen in expectation
she imagined a red balloon deflating to a foolish remnant. (In the cave, 171)

Tessa Hadley

#3. Once they had been equal in their separate freedoms. They had set out to have children as lightly as if they were playing house, and now her necessarily domestic life bored him, and she was bound to it in her body and imagination. This imbalance was fated, built into their biology.

Tessa Hadley

#4. I'm really all right, she would think, carefully, lightly, as she pulled the key from the ignition, trying not to examine the sensation too closely or lose it with any sudden movement, as if it were a thin-filmed shiny bubble poised in her chest.

Tessa Hadley

#5. But now everything was lost: all the scattered effect of a real person, complicated beyond counting. (Post production, 197)

Tessa Hadley

#6. We're wedged tight into the accident of our moment in history.

Tessa Hadley

#7. The gracious thing to do was to accept the beauty of the opportunity if it was given

Tessa Hadley

#8. And that was true too, that was what the Culverts were like: crucified by their shyness and at the same time contemptuous of the world of ordinary people they couldn't talk to.

Tessa Hadley

#9. What use was her grown-up knowledge
acquired through such initiations, at such risk
in this world of infants, who had to be kept safe?

Tessa Hadley