16 Quotes by Charles Palliser

We only value ourselves as others value us, for it might be said that we hold ourselves in trust for others.

When you love, you entrust to that person your sense of your own worth, and if that person throws you aside, you believe profoundly and utterly that it is because you are worthless. That is a kind of death.

The greatest actors can create a human being before the very eyes of spectators – not show them something beforehand like a puppet. To go out onto the stage and become the character at a moment of crisis and speak without knowing what you are going to say until the words come out! To court that danger and to triumph, that is the great adventure that life offers. The incomparable adventure. Don’t you see that?

We don’t exist in and for ourselves but only in as much as we are re-created in the imagination of another person— by entering that person’s life as fully as possible. I mean, entering it imaginatively, intellectually, physically and emotionally with all the conflicts that that makes inevitable.

Yes, Jonnie," Emma said. "Extraordinary as it seems, it was mere coincidence that brought you to our door. It's the sort of thing that you expect to find only in a novel — and only when you know the author has been too idle to work it out any better.

To exist is to be betrayed, since we exist for others only by virtue of what we betray of ourselves to them.

I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to unreliable.

Victorian values meant brutalizing people who were often poor.

Living with my grandmother in Bath, I sort of thought I was living in the 19th century. My grandmother was someone who, in a way, was rather defiantly trying to live a pre-World War I existence.