Samantha Harvey Quotes

• “This is what writing does to you, it seems, it turns objects that used to be just things in your life into things that must be described, and at the same time makes them feel increasingly indescribable.”

  Samantha Harvey

  6 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “Nothing had changed since those days except that everything had degraded and two decades of light had beaten the colours back a shade.”

  Samantha Harvey

  3 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement

• “When I don't sleep, it's not that I feel tired so much as assaulted. In the morning after a night of no sleep my eyes are sore and tender and can barely open. My joints ache. There's a taste in my mouth which isn't like any other taste, only a feeling, and that feeling is defeat. My skull aches evenly across its hemisphere. [...] I go to bed at night, I get beaten up, come downstairs in the morning. Then I go about the day as if things were normal and I hadn't been beaten up, and everyone else treats me as if I hadn't been beaten up, and that way I survive, but no more than that. If somebody willed your destruction they could do it this way, by taking away your sleep. Of course, it's tried and tested”

  Samantha Harvey

  3 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “while it only requires a single yes to get married, to get divorced you have to say no so many times in so many different ways, and so expensively, that it does not always seem worth the trouble.”

  Samantha Harvey

  2 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “To write fiction you have to engage in organised fraud, the laundering of experience into the offshore haven of words.”

  Samantha Harvey

  2 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

• “There is freedom there; there is always freedom in the past. The self you left behind lives in endless possibility. The older you get, the bigger and wilder the past becomes, a place that can never again be tended and which is therefore prone to that loveliness that happens on wastelands and wildernesses, where grass has grown over scrap metal and wheat has sprung up in cracks between concrete and there is no regular shape for the light to fall flat on, so it vaults and multiplies and you want to go there. You want to go there like you want to go to a lover.”

  Samantha Harvey

  2 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “How do you tell the difference between a person made of flesh and one made of words?”

  Samantha Harvey

  2 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “elderly people acquire an unpredictable, unreliable look, almost impish in some, as though they are slipping between gears.”

  Samantha Harvey

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement

• “You appraise every word of them, each abstruse, unwavering and rousing word. Book II of the Taittiriya Upanishad, the book of joy: Man’s elemental Self comes from food: this his head; this his right arm; this his left arm; this his heart; these legs his foundation. You get up and pace. Food gives rise to the Self? Food gives rise to the Self? The Self—Atman—is in food, and rises from food to vegetation to earth to water to air to Spirit to Brahman. Atman and Brahman are in the eel pressed indecorously between two pieces of stale bread! In the lowest things the glow of universal Spirit—but wait, the elemental Self, the living Self, the thinking Self. Legs are the elemental Self, but is the head, the brain, the mind?”

  Samantha Harvey

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

• “Only somebody with a mind like a rock could go on with the idea that we on our little island are separate from those other places — that great world is rainbow threads woven into our greys and greens. Where did this leather belt come from? he asked me, of a belt I couldn’t see. Not English goats, but Norwegian ones. And the flour for baking bread that feeds our great cities? From Baltic grain, high up in the north. And the ironwork on our new weathervane? Spanish iron. Our little land is flecked with foreignness, the Lord wants our colourful commingling.”

  Samantha Harvey

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “You would think that living is a kind of scholarship in time, and that the longer we live the more expert we become at coping with it, in the way that, if you play tennis enough, you get used to coping with faster and faster serves. Instead I find that the longer I live the more bemused I become, and the more impenetrable the subject shows itself to be. I sit on a heap of days.”

  Samantha Harvey

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “She paused; her speech was ever thus. Spirals of deepening particulars, then pauses when she saw she'd strayed from the point.”

  Samantha Harvey

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “This must be grace, to be defeated by one's better nature.”

  Samantha Harvey

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “It is not for us to try to change the world to something that suits us better, but for us to change, to bend to a greater weight.”

  Samantha Harvey

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Why can't time go backwards as well as forward? If time's not a river but a circle, and if you can travel round a circle one way or another and end up where you started, why can't it go this way and that?”

  Samantha Harvey

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “It reminded me that, for all that you love to call a spade a spade, the spade is always a symbol for something else.”

  Samantha Harvey

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “If the mind is a cacophony, the subconscious is silent theatre.”

  Samantha Harvey

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “The mind is a prison. And when we write the noise is distilled and alchemised, and the self can find a way out, which I think is what love is – the escape of the self from the self.”

  Samantha Harvey

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “But it’s our nature to deny what frightens us, and it’s not wicked or dull. Isn’t there always a bright, willing part of us that keeps hoping that what we know isn’t true?”

  Samantha Harvey

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “In a review of Beheld, by TaraShea Nesbit: Nesbit captures a paradox of historical writing — that it’s in the invention and improvisation that the past feels most pressing and most real.”

  Samantha Harvey

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Sleep. Sleep. Like money, you only think about it when you have too little. Then you think about it all the time, and the less you have the more you think about it. It becomes the prism through which you see the world and nothing can exist except in relation to it.”

  Samantha Harvey

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “He said I was trying as usual to solve the future before it had become a problem. But it seems to me, Butterfly, that men have never really heard of forethought.”

  Samantha Harvey

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “The night is itself without narrative – the way the hours move, less like a stream flowing somewhere and more like water swilling in a shallow pool, until suddenly the pool is drained and it’s morning.”

  Samantha Harvey

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “When I got you home and we asked where you had been, you said, ‘I’ve been in an elevator, going up and down.’ So we sat you out in the garden at the mossy table and gave you tea, and asked you again. ‘I’ve been in an elevator, looking for love.’ ‘For two years?’ we asked. ‘Love is hard to find.”

  Samantha Harvey

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Poetry can turn phrases that rotate the world, too small a rotation to cause a public commotion but enough to knock a solitary life a fraction off its axis, such that it will never be the same again.”

  Samantha Harvey

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement