79 Quotes by Jonathan Miles

…wondering, not for the first time, if there was a kind of dark bliss built into dementia: an immunity from death and abandonment, a way of fixing a point in time so that nothing can change, nothing can be rewritten, no one can leave.

He deplored the victims as much as their murderer but most of all deplored the hours they all spent crowding his head; his job, he felt, was merely to punctuate a sentence he wished he'd never read. "From my earliest childhood," he says, "it was always my goal to live in a state of astonishment. But this was the wrong kind of astonishment. This was astonishment at humanity's capacity for evil, depravity, for greed, for apathy. It was too much for me. I wanted to be amazed by something greater.

This is our condition. We do not solve problems. We replace them with other problems.

I’m not sure the word “sorry” does anything justice. It’s such a loose word isn’t it? I mean how can one puny word encompass all the stuff you did – But also the, all the things you didn’t do? It’s the inactions that keep people up at night. The actions, they’re done. They’re done. It’s the inactions that never go away. They just hang there. They ROT. How is sorry supposed to stretch across all that?

Novelists lie for a living - what is a novel, after all, but an assembly of fibs paradoxically meant to illustrate something true? - but generally see a distinction between lying on the page and lying off it.

The rich flavors of duck meat have always attracted sweet, fruit-based sauces.

For me, alcohol has this endless fascination that there's this substance that can enhance life so beautifully and destroy it so completely.

The angle we give the bathroom mirror is always meant to flatter.

Bermuda's beaches are justly famed for their pink sands, colored by the pulverized shells of single-celled organisms called foraminifera. When occupied by bikini-clad sunbathers, the beaches, with Victorian primness, appear to be blushing.