Sybille Bedford Quotes

#1. The future of human society. Had it made an irrevocably false start? The compass error that gets harder to correct with every mile you go?

Sybille Bedford

#2. Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family - that's impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don't empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.

Peter Singer

#3. How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

Jorge Luis Borges

#4. It would seem that in history it's never a tooth for a tooth, but a thousand, a hundred thousand for one.

Sybille Bedford

#5. I don't feel under pressure to work because I love what I do and I wanted to do the projects that came my way.

Olivia Williams

#6. To remain monolingual reduces the mind to the confines of a tramline.

Sybille Bedford

#7. Public opinion, the sum of private opinions, does matter, can matter often for good.

Sybille Bedford

#8. Guillermo was lonely and serviceable and always rushed in to do the things one wanted in a way one did not want them done.

Sybille Bedford

#9. She was also incapacitated by much of daily life and had 'no aptitude whatsoever' for domesticity.

Sybille Bedford

#10. If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called 'sex' is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.

Judith Butler

#11. In Europe, where human relations like clothes are supposed to last, one's got to be wearable. In France one has to be interesting, in Italy pleasant, in England one has to fit.

Sybille Bedford

#12. All wealth is relative; and so is its absence.

Sybille Bedford

#13. He gave way to the fear that had come with her, the sense of the breaking of promises, the incoherence of Time. He broke.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#14. This line of reasoning could have frightened him, but it did not. He gained a certain strength from it. Because, after all, what can be imagined can be achieved.
At the head of the stairs, he paused to straighten a mask that had been knocked askew.

Mal Peet

#15. I detest ... anything over-cooked, over-herbed, over-sauced, over elaborate. Nothing can go very far wrong at table as long as there is honest bread, butter, olive oil, a generous spirit, lively appetites and attention to what we are eating.

Sybille Bedford

#16. All food is the gift of the gods and has something of the miraculous, the egg no less than the truffle.

Sybille Bedford

#17. role has changed, from telling the world what their business is about to listening to what our customers are saying about us,

Anonymous

#18. What I learnt came to me . . . at second and at third hand, in chunks and puzzles, degrees and flashes.

Sybille Bedford

#19. I write because I'm a writer. It is rather like cooking: to make something out of the raw material at hand.

Sybille Bedford

#20. I don't really want to be compared to Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan, but I really feel honored and really proud that people actually see me as them or similar to them, and because they are my inspiration for what I have become today. I am really honored that people compare me to those people.

Tony Jaa

#21. A part, a large part, of traveling is an engagement of the ego v. the world. The world is hydra headed, as old as the rocks and as changing as the sea, enmeshed inextricably in its ways. The ego wants to arrive at places safely and on time.

Sybille Bedford