34 Quotes by Alan Sillitoe

Hope to the very end, he told himself, even when you’ve slipped into the fires of Hell and the flames are searing your guts.

Government wars aren’t my wars; they’ve got nowt to do with me, because my own war’s all that I’ll ever be bothered about.

I wonder if I’m the only one in the running business with this system of forgetting that I’m running because I’m too busy thinking.

The rowdy gang of singers who sat at the scattered tables saw Arthur walk unsteadily to the head of the stairs, and though they must have all known that he was dead drunk, and seen the danger he would soon be in, no one attempted to talk to him and lead him back to his seat. With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins playing hide-and-seek inside his stomach, he fell from the top-most stair to the bottom.

He’d never had much to do with the police in the Nottinghamshire village where he lived. They existed at a distance, as it were, and Joshua’s life hadn’t led him closer than that. By accident his actions had been law-abiding.

We know you weren’t in the house’, he said, starting up again, cranking himself with the handle. They always say ‘We’, ‘We’, never ‘I’ ‘I’ – as if they feel braver and righter knowing there’s a lot of them against only one.

I’m a human being and I’ve got thoughts and secrets and bloody life inside me that he doesn’t know is there, and he’ll never know what’s there because he’s stupid. I suppose you’ll laugh at this, me saying the governor’s a stupid bastard when I know hardly how to write and he can read and write and add-up like a professor. But what I say is true right enough. He’s stupid, and I’m not, because I can see further into the likes of him than he can see into the likes of me.