37 Quotes by Linda Grant

It’s not the punch you expect that knocks you down.

I’m a really hectic dreamer; I never wake up not out of a dream, and there’s loads going on, lots of action, big blockbuster dreams, they’re all major enterprises.

I am not by any stretch of the imagination a tidy person, and the piles of unread books on the coffee table and by my bed have a plaintive, pleading quality to me – ‘Read me, please!’

Reading wasn’t my religion – it was my oxygen.

What is the death of a soldier even off duty of an occupying army walking in an occupied territory against the death of a little boy screaming in terror in his father’s arms Where is the equivalence.

A new dress. Is this all it takes to make a new beginning, this shred of dyed cloth, shaped into the form of a woman’s body?

Without a physical presence on the shelves, the Kindle books seemed slightly insubstantial. There was no equivalent of the satisfying cracked spine. There was nothing to bequeath to the next generation, nothing to sell on to live a new life in someone else’s library. But at least the torrent of books that kept arriving had slowed down and there was space to walk up the stairs. I was being freed from the burden of all those bloody books.

Pain itself, as a pure experience, is something different from the anxiety attached to it.

And your neihjbour is sitting next door weeping as she watches her child facing a crowd of Palestiniankids armed with rocks which could take your boy’s eye out or give him brain damage if god forbids he took off his helmet one of those dusty stones hit him in the head.