William Boyd quotes - page 2

Even though I've been an avid consumer of contemporary music since my early teens, the world of rock music has always been at something of a distance - I listen to it, read about it, I talk about it, but I've had little or no contact with its denizens. (William Boyd)

When it's mutual, a man and a woman know, instinctively, wordlessly. They may do nothing about it, but the knowledge of that shared desire is out there in the world - as obvious as neon, saying: I want you, I want you, I want you.

William Boyd

Dignity was the first quality to be abandoned when the heart took over the running of human affairs.

William Boyd

It's amazing how sudden the effect is - it must be the result of a deep atavistic mating urge buried inside us. A glance and you think: 'Yes, this is the one, this one is right for me.' Every instinct in your body seems to sing in unison.

William Boyd

Is that a good definition of marking the ageing watershed? That moment when you realize - quite rationally, quite unemotionally - that the world in the not-so-distant future will not contain you: that the trees you planted will continue growing but you will not be there to see them.

William Boyd

We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.

William Boyd

There are things in life we don't understand, and when we meet them, all we can do is let them alone.

William Boyd

I stood there in the kitchen, watching her staring across the meadow still searching for her nemesis and I thought, suddenly, that this is all our lives - this is the one fact that applies to us all, that makes us what we are, our common mortality, our common humanity. One day someone is going to come and take us away: you don't need to have been a spy, I thought, to feel like this.

William Boyd

We all possess, like it or not, the people we know, and are possessed by them in turn.

William Boyd

Humankind can tolerate only so much rejection.

William Boyd

Sometimes limbo is a tolerable place to be stuck. (William Boyd)

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William Boyd

William Boyd - Image

Photo: Michael Fennell, CC BY-SA 3.0

Occupation: British Novelist
Born: March 7, 1952
Quotes count: 36

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