The Dead Writers Society - favourite quotes.

My favourite English author passed away at the weekend, Martin Amis. I was at an intermediate level at 16, I was at my grandfather's house (who was English) and I picked up a Martin Amis book: Money. He let me borrow it.

My God, it was a funny book, and I went on to read the Rachel Papers, and I adore the London trilogy. Do you have a favourite quote from a dead writer?

I never forgot this passage from Money:

I gestured at my litre of fizzy red wine. “Want a drop of this?” I asked him.
"No thanks. I try not to drink at lunchtime.”
"So do I. But I never quite make it.”
"I feel like shit all day if I drink at lunchtime.”
"Me too. But I feel like shit all lunchtime if I don’t.”
"Yes, well it all comes down to choices, doesn’t it?” he said. “It’s the same in the evenings. Do you want to feel good at night or do you want to feel good in the morning? It’s the same with life. Do you want to feel good young or do you want to feel good old? One or the other, not both.”
"Isn’t it a tragedy?”

Two spring immediately to mind. The first line of Brighton Rock by Graham Greene:

"Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him."

And the final line from The Great Gatsby:

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

This often comes to mind.

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

(From: Murphy by Samuel Beckett)

I have a gazofilacio of about thirty poems. One of my favourites is The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin. It closes with:

".....We slowed again,

And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled

A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower

Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain."