21 Quotes by Tessa Hadley

What use was her grown-up knowledge--acquired through such initiations, at such risk--in this world of infants, who had to be kept safe?

...we're wedged tight into the accident of our moment in history.

She knew from her own experience what a great labour it was, binding up again all the mess of self, which in your extremity you had unbound.

Other grown-ups, especially women, had learned somehow to live on the surfaces of their bodies, controlling them and presenting a prepared version of them to the world.

What use was her grown-up knowledge – acquired through such initiations, at such risk – in this world of infants, who had to be kept safe?

But what if the novels were right? What if sentimentality was closer to the truth of life and cynicism was the evasion.

It’s painful and terrible that youth is over, and with it that whole game of looking and longing and vying for attention, hoping for something, for some absolute transformation of everything. But it’s also a reprieve to be let off that hook and know that you’re simply in your own hands at last.

I’d lived all along as if I was acting out some turbulent drama; then I woke up one day and found I’d stopped believing in the play.

The past is closed up inside its own depressing little museum of faded styles and codes and anticipations; you can’t re-enter it.