The Ice Age: Important Textual Quotations
- Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks: Methinks I see her as an eagle muing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazi'd eyes at the full midday beam:
- Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour:
- England hath need of thee …
- Oh! Raise us up, return to us again;
- And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
- A pheasant, flying over Anthony Keating's pond, died of a heart attack, as birds sometimes do:
- He had opened it, over his cholesterol-free breakfast.
- And digging a grave would be good exercise.
- The sour London soil had been thick with bones and plastic beads and indestructible nuggets of silver paper.
- These are terrible times we live in.
- Don’t worry about me my dear, you have enough worries of your own. …… What a terrible year. Look after yourself, put yourself first, that is the only way.
- Nevertheless, it was puzzling, that so many dreadful things had happened in so short a space of time. Why Kitty, why Max, why Anthony Keating? And why had the punishments been so unrelated to the offences?
- A heart attack, at the age of thirty-eight?
- But even the heart attack had not been the final blow aimed by fate at Anthony Keating. The heart attack had proved to have compensations, the chief of which was Alison.
- The British press had made much of Jane's imprisonment.
- So, there it was. A terrible year, a terrible world. Two of his acquaintances in prison, one dead by assassination, himself in debt by many thousands.
- He had rarely done the sensible thing in his life:
- His father had been a churchman and a schoolmaster.
- Mr. Keating had accepted Anthony's rejection of the Church without a murmur, conceding that Christian faith was a rare blessing these days.
- He had to pay for the wife and children, for his wife's lovers (who were usually non-self-supporting) and for his own lovers.
- London became a changed place to Anthony.
- Anthony liked Len's girl, Maureen, too.
- 'Oh, Anthony, you are sweet.'
- Maureen Kirby had been born in Attercliffe, Sheffield, in 1946, nine months after her father was demobbed. She was the youngest of six, and slept three to a bed through most of her childhood.
- She was quite happy for two or three years, cutting, shampooing, back combing, trying to make eighteen-year-old girls look thirty.
- So at the age of twenty she took a secretarial course. Secretaries were glamorous, thought Maureen.
- She didn’t mind him putting her hand up her skirt, in fact, she quite liked it.
- So he willingly admitted, was a dirty old man, who didn’t mind a little harmless fun.
- Because he was after all old enough to be her father, but she certainly didn’t mind his dirty jokes and dirty postcards.
- It was his vulgarity that helped to refine Maureen a little, though she never became very refined: when he showed her for instance, a joke rubber toy of nude lady which, when filled with water and squeezed, performed certain natural functions, she laughed rather feebly.
- I gave Rosemary cancer of the breast, said Alison to herself aloud, to see how the words sounded. They did not sound very foolish. She her hands over her own breasts. Shivering. Well, they would get her in the end. Age and Death would catch her, if not their forerunners.
- He sees a rare bird, a wonder, a bird that, as he knows from his book, rarely visits below the snow line, rarely visits the haunts of men, a secret beauty.
- Alison, there is no leaving. Alison can neither live nor die. Alison has Molly. Her life is beyond imagining. It will not be imagined. Britain will recover, but not Alison Murray.
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The Me you have always known, the Me that's a stranger still.
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Wednesday, June 06, 2007
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