24 Quotes by Tony Hendra

History was a way to live extra lives, to cheat the limits of flesh and blood, to roll the rock back from the tomb and free the resurrected dead.

The only way to know God, the only way to know the other, is to listen. Listening is reaching out into that unknown other self, surmounting your walls and theirs; listening is the beginning of understanding, the first exercise of love. None of us listen enough, do we, dear? We only listen to a fraction of what people say. It's a wonderfully useful thing to do. You almost always hear something you didn't expect

It was a music of the spirit, seeking peace, not emotional release, expressing the hunger of the soul rather than the heart. A way of sequencing notes so ancient it might be music's mother lode, its Fertile Crescent. It wouldn't have grated, I felt, on the ears of ancient Greeks or Egyptians or Mesopotamians or Sumerians—or even on the august auditory equipment of the Buddha or Lao-tzu.

I didn't want him to go. I'd never felt so safe and secure with anyone in my life.....I wanted to tell him everything that had ever happened in my few years. There were a million things I wanted to ask him.

Again the hug, again the swirl of skirts, again the super-sandals squeaking away down the linoleum. Then silence. And peace.

Satire dramatizes better than any other use of it, the inherent contradiction of free speech that it functions best when what is being said is at its most outrageous.

This is the end. This is as far as you can go. After this it all starts over again.

I was awake and this was reality, the new reality of nothing--and worse, of having to continue to exist.

You see, dear – I think there are two types of people in the world. Those who divide the world up into two kinds of people... and those who don’t.