Athill Quotes

#1. Writing shouldn't come between the reader and what's being described. It should be as transparent as possible.

Diana Athill

#2. It was like removing layers of crumpled brown paper from an awkwardly shaped parcel, and revealing the attractive present which it contained.

Diana Athill

#3. Everything that I've gone through informs me and my opinions in a way, I guess because I am a child of segregation. I lived through it. I lived in it. I was of it.

Samuel L. Jackson

#4. Often and often must he have thought, that, to be or not to be forever, was a question, which must be settled; as it is the foundation, and the only foundation upon which we feel that there can rest one thought, one feeling, or one purpose worthy of a human soul.

Jones Very

#5. It grieved him to think of that paltry, guarded, nut-like thing that was his artistic reputation.

Carol Shields

#6. Read it aloud to yourself because that's the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK.

Diana Athill

#7. I have heard people bewailing man's landing on the moon, as though before it was touched by an astronaut's foot it was made of silver or mother-of-pearl, and that footprint turned it into gray dust. But the moon never was made of mother-of-pearl, and it still shines as if it were so made.

Diana Athill

#8. Generally office and home were far apart, and home was much more important than office. I was not ashamed of valuing my private life more highly than my work; that, to my mind, is what everyone ought to do.

Diana Athill

#9. Life is a journey. We hear it often. Do we care about the intermediate destinations? No, we are sleeping and dreaming. If this is true, how can we pursue life as our journey?

Bhavik Sarkhedi

#10. I am not sure that digging in our past guilts is a useful occupation for the very old, given that one can do so little about them. I have reached a stage at which one hopes to be forgiven for concentrating on how to get through the present.

Diana Athill

#11. Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time; our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a sequence of events - a story - and when we can't figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow.

Douglas Coupland

#12. To be on set every day with a whole bunch of people that know their job and my job a lot better than I do and I'm supposed to tell them what to do, that's very uncomfortable and awkward.

Timothy Miller

#13. Still immersed in his dream, he drank down the tepid tea. It tasted bitter. Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.

Yukio Mishima

#14. It is almost as hard for us to sense our own species quality as it is to sense our species smell.

Lois Crisler

#15. An important aspect of the ebbing of sex was that other things became interesting. Sex obliterates the individuality of young women more often than it does that of young men, because so much more of a woman than a man is used by sex.

Diana Athill

#16. My two valuable lessons are: avoid romanticism and abhor possessiveness.

Diana Athill

#17. A compassionate open home is part of Christian responsibility, and should be practiced up to the level of capacity.

Francis A. Schaeffer

#18. We must always remember that we are only midwives - if we want praise for progeny we must give birth to our own.

Diana Athill

#19. People are more than just the way they look.

Madeleine L'Engle

#20. She was an object lesson on the essential luck, whatever hardships may come their way, of those born able to make things.

Diana Athill

#21. Look! Why want anything more marvellous than what is.

Diana Athill