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“The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour”
― Beryl Bainbridge

“Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.”
― Beryl Bainbridge

“What we remember is probably fiction anyway.”
― Beryl Bainbridge

“Some people find it comfortable to go through life on their knees, and good luck to them, but I prefer to keep my spine in the position nature intended.”
― Beryl Bainbridge, Master Georgie

“I don't know why everybody doesn't write because everybody talks.”
― Beryl Bainbridge

“There are many things in this life capable of throwing people off course - the death of someone close, the loss of income or health, the realisation that cherished hopes cannot always be fulfilled”
― Beryl Bainbridge, Master Georgie

“A man bears the weight of his own body without knowing it, but he soon feels the weight of any other object. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that a man cannot forget- but not himself.”
― Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man for Himself

“I've never been drawn to the feminist movement. I've never been put down by a man, unless I deserved it, and have never felt inferior.”
― Beryl Bainbridge

“...he raised his eyes above the black shapes of the trees and saw a small moon, the colour of a lemon, dragged by clouds across the sky. Moons, he thought, were so that men like himself would know they lived here on earth.”
― Beryl Bainbridge, Another Part of the Wood

“Mrs MacFarley called the valley the Glen. She called the light at early evening the gloaming. She liked to go Roaming in the Gloaming in the Glen.”
― Beryl Bainbridge, Another Part of the Wood

“It wasn't all misery. On one of our halts we lay spreadeagled on the ice and stared up at a sky blazing with the glory of the most wonderful aurora I'd ever witnessed. I groaned beneath the splendour of those silken curtains, yellow, green, and orange, billowing at the window of the heavens.”
― Beryl Bainbridge, The Birthday Boys

“At night when they prepared for bed Freda removed all her clothes and lay like a great fretful baby, majestically dimpled and curved. Brenda wore her pajamas and her underwear and a tweed coat—that was the difference between them.”
― Beryl Bainbridge, The Bottle Factory Outing

“In every life there are pauses and interruptions... points of time where one course of action ends and another begins; and by vicissitude of fortune, or alteration of employment, by change of place or loss of friendship, we are forced to say of something, this is the last.”
― Beryl Bainbridge, According to Queeney

“I sense a space around him. He has a manner of eyeing people, even if he's standing face to face, as though he sees them from a distance.”
― Beryl Bainbridge, The Birthday Boys

“As a child she had been taught it was rude to say no, unless she didn't mean it. If she was offered another piece of cake and she wanted it she was obliged to refuse out of politeness. And if she didn't want it she had to say yes, even if it choked her. It was involved but understandable.”
― Beryl Bainbridge, The Bottle Factory Outing

“I left him and went up on deck to look out at the slithering city, its glitter of street lamps fizzy under the rain. There’s something wrong about a ship in dock, something pathetic, like a bird fluttering in a spill of oil. The Nova was tethered to her berth by ropes and chains, caught in a pool of greasy water. I could feel her shifting under my feet, tugging to be free.”
― Beryl Bainbridge, The Birthday Boys

“This time I didn’t bother to apologise to Bill. One grows sick of being thought in the wrongâ€�”
― Beryl Bainbridge, The Birthday Boys

“Man himself is so buffeted by shifts of thought and mood, not knowing from one day to the next what he truly feels, that a shifting earth is well-nigh the last straw.”
― Beryl Bainbridge, Master Georgie

“Earlier she had thought him insipid: his complexion too fair, his expression too bland. He had taken so little notice of her that she suspected he was perceptive only about himself. Now, in the slight flaring of his nostrils, the distainful slant of his head, she saw that he judged her naive. But for the discoloration of those tapering, nicotine-stained fingers drumming the tablecloth, she might have been afraid of him.”
― Beryl Bainbridge, An Awfully Big Adventure

“For the rest of my life, she thought, I shall glimpse you in crowds.”
― Beryl Bainbridge, An Awfully Big Adventure

“She protested she’d rather freeze than wear the coat Lily had bought her. It was too big and it had a fur collar. ‘It sounds rather glamorous,â€� he said. ‘That’s as maybe,â€� she retorted. ‘It’s too much trouble. You have to paint your face if you wear a fur. It draws attention.”
― Beryl Bainbridge, An Awfully Big Adventure

“Under the monstrous flesh of Mrs Biggs, the Tsar lay pinned like a moth on the sofa, bony knees splitting the air, thighs splayed out to take her awful weight. I could not breathe. Wave upon wave of fear and joy swept over me. Like an oiled snake, deep delving and twisting, Mrs Biggs poisoned him slowly, rearing and stabbing him convulsively. Her body writhed gently and was still. Ignoring the woman above him the grey Tsar lay as if dead, pinioned limply, eyes wide and staring, speared in an act of contrition. Full-blown love eddied from the woman, blowzy hips sunk in weariness, litmus flesh soaking up virtue from the body beneath.”
― Beryl Bainbridge, Harriet Said...

“Rehearsing with Geoffrey would make it easier when the time came for Meredith to claim her. Penetration, from what she had gathered from library books, was inescapably painful unless one had played a lot of tennis or ridden stallions, and she hadn’t done either.”
― Beryl Bainbridge, An Awfully Big Adventure

“Suffering, which fell to one’s lot in the course of nature, by chance or by fate, did not, ceteris paribus, seem so painful when imposed by the arbitrary will of strangers; it was the wounds inflicted by those closest to one that drew blood.”
― Beryl Bainbridge, According to Queeney

“For all his worldliness he was shocked. He was afraid she was becoming corrupted. He had only to suggest she lift her hips a fraction higher or arch her back rather more sharply for her to comply at once. She began to add certain embellishments of her own. On their third night she ordered him quite roughly to bring his legs closer together and found a way of rubbing herself against his knee while sucking at his neck that made him shudder.”
― Beryl Bainbridge