Top 54 Unsworth Quotes
#1. Only way to live here is day by day, same as anywhere.
Barry Unsworth
#2. The hope of Elevation has to remain something random, impossible to see properly, given not to those who earn it but to those with no discernible right to it. Resentment, fear, loathing, and a tiny, flickering light of hope always just out of reach, that is Hell, yes?
Simon Kurt Unsworth
#3. But what a man sees still must depend on what he looks for. While I have eyes of my own, I shall not need to borrow yours.
Barry Unsworth
#4. Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.
Barry Unsworth
#6. Wilson had been killed by everybody. It was this that made his death special, the children had been told. It was justice, it was all the people showing how much they hated this crime. Killing was justice when everybody joined in.
Barry Unsworth
#7. We are quite at ease in this no man's land of ignorance and doubt and dispute, absorbed in the ambiguities of trying to reach truth by mixing fact with invention.
Barry Unsworth
#8. Wickedness is too common in the world
for us to think much of why and wherefore.
It is more natural to ask about the rarer thing
and wonder why people sometimes do good.
Barry Unsworth
#9. All my fiction starts from a feeling of unique perception, the pressure of a secret, a story that needs to be told.
Barry Unsworth
#10. The odds against this were tremendous, but Edith was not interested in the odds; people who thought about odds were unheroic and would never achieve anything. 20
Barry Unsworth
#11. Doubt is the ally of hope, not its enemy, and together they made all the blessing he had.
Barry Unsworth
#12. So whether you're up against a wall in your business, or if Facebook is disapproving every ad you create, you've got to think like a winner and find a solution. There's always a way.
Nick Unsworth
#13. The kind of truth that can be asserted by argument had lost all glamour, all lustre, for him, seeming no more now than another aspect of that ancient urge - much older than the desire for truth - to command attention, dominate one's fellows.
Barry Unsworth
#14. Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way
Barry Unsworth
#15. I like the condition of being an outsider, just passing through.
Barry Unsworth
#16. No latitude makes any difference to what men will do to other men, whether for gain or in the name of justice.
Barry Unsworth
#17. I knew little of the world, as the Justice had seen, but I knew that we can lose ourselves in the parts we play and if this continues too long we will not find our way back again.
Barry Unsworth
#19. Kneading memory makes the dough of fiction; which we know, sometimes never stops rising.
Barry Unsworth
#20. But whatever the ramifications, whatever turns the path takes, the beginning is always there, in a particular moment, a particular point of access.
Barry Unsworth
#21. Numbers of men are getting richer and greater numbers are getting poorer. Alas, both classes have higher expectations these days. In Short, sir, there has been a leap in bribes.
Barry Unsworth
#22. A little bit of kindness goes a long way with women.
Barry Unsworth
#24. Children aren't supposed to like dark chocolate. It's one of those bitter things that you are meant to acquire a taste for later in life, like olives and self-pity.
Emma Jane Unsworth
#25. Love does not stand still, as everyone knows; it is always adding to its own shape whether by advance or retreat. Wounds can be absorbed, but only like elements embodied in a story; they are always there, part of the meaning.
Barry Unsworth
#26. It is always through arbitrary combinations that experience enslaves the memory.
Barry Unsworth
#27. Grief works its own perversions and betrayals; the shape of what we have lost is as subject to corruption as the mortal body ...
Barry Unsworth
#28. Men are moral beings in their untrammelled nature. If constraint and coercion can once be removed they will be happy and if they are happy they will also be good ...
Barry Unsworth
#29. Those occasional people who seem to achieve some kind of happiness here like your two dead colleagues, these are the things that Hell allows to flourish in tiny, stunted bursts, to make it immeasurably worse for everyone else.
Simon Kurt Unsworth
#30. But joy is individual, and can only be experienced alone. Hell is communal, but Heaven is personal.
Simon Kurt Unsworth
#31. Angels are not complete, they need their counterparts, the dark needs the bright, the hidden needs the open, and vice versa. Sometimes they meet and recognise each other. Sometimes, as with Horatio and me, the pairing occurs over spaces of time and distance.
Barry Unsworth
#32. Eudora Welty's 'A Curtain of Green' had an enormous effect on me. But my early attempts to graft stories from the Deep South onto North of England provincialism were not successful. All were rejected.
Barry Unsworth
#33. Useful thing a warrant. Murder and theft change their names if you have one.
Barry Unsworth
#34. There are no stronger fetters than those we forge for ourselves.
Barry Unsworth
#35. Those confiding their pain cannot know at the outset how much they will be required to relive it.
Barry Unsworth
#36. It's the worst yet. I'm in TEFL City.'
'TEFL City' because we called those times 'TEFL-pondering mornings', when your only option felt like emigration and teaching.
Emma Jane Unsworth
#37. And this was history now: heroic protest, concerted rebellion, execution of the tyrant, a new social order. It ran like a clear stream--useless to require it to resemble the viscous substance of truth.
Unsworth
#39. When you in de right you heart strong you no 'fraid nottin'.
Barry Unsworth
#40. What if you're chicken? What if you're more chicken than chicken soup?" Malloy said.
Kit gave him a long, hard look. "Then you pretend you're not. You pretend so hard it comes true.
Tania Unsworth
#41. The flood of cheap manufactures, for which the people have no need,destroys their industries. They become dependent on this trade and the demand for goods can only be met by enslaving their fellows.
Barry Unsworth
#42. Terrible and ancient and scarred with the endless cold of space, the terrible and ancient things glistened with frozen moisture and colors played across the surface of the skin, colors that were never meant to be seen on earth.
Simon Kurt Unsworth
#44. Afterward I remembered these things very clearly, with that longing we feel sometimes to recover a state of life that we have lost for ever, though it is perhaps that we have lost it is all its value.
Barry Unsworth
#45. A man may go through life and remain ignorant of himself he may think himself as other than he truly is and he may die with this illusion still intact because no circumstance of his life has obliged him to revise it.
Barry Unsworth
#46. These things you treasure, how often they're somebody else's trash.
Emma Jane Unsworth
#47. It is everyone's bounden duty to try to get more than they have got already. If you have got two shillin' you try to make it into four shillin' ... there is no end to it.
Barry Unsworth
#48. In my generation, history was taught in terms of grand figures, men on whom the destiny of the nation hinged, quintessential heroes.
Barry Unsworth
#49. Hell is not a place of no hope, Thomas, but a place where tiny amounts of hope are allowed to flourish.
Simon Kurt Unsworth
#50. The mind is constituted to accept the god of the more powerful. If you have to choose between the god of the slave owner and the god of the enslaved, naturally you will choose the former ...
Barry Unsworth
#51. Big cities comforted me: the cover, the chaos, the hollow sympathy of the architecture, the Tube lines snaking underground. London could swallow you up, in a good way. There were times when I'd been broken and being subsumed into a city had made me feel part of a whole again.
Emma Jane Unsworth
#52. The heart is a vital organ, but it is a faulty guide to conduct. It is the mind makes judgements and comparisons, furnishes evidence on which ideas of truth can be founded.
Barry Unsworth
#53. The successful cannot be unhappy
it was a contradiction in terms.
Barry Unsworth
#54. The kneading of memory makes the dough of fiction, which, as we know, can go on yeasting for ever ...
Barry Unsworth
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