A hundred years ago, people had perfectly understood that you could die of a broken heart, now they thought you were making a fuss about nothing… Certain kinds of suffering are like radiation: they cause furious growth and mutation of the inner self.

— Amanda Craig

All age is a kind of tiredness, I think. When you’re young, the lines never show. Every morning you wake unmarked, wiped clear by sleep. One day, though, you see lines that itch, as though some crumb of existence has been creased into your skin. They can never be smoothed away, and after a while you forget that this heavy, irritable feeling wasn’t always there.

— Amanda Craig

All paradises are there to be expelled from.

— Amanda Craig

But this city is a world of its own, a country within a country. People are used to taking the old and making it news; and used, too, to taking the new and making it old. Every glass of water from its taps, it is said, has passed six times through the kidneys of another, and every scrap of its land has been trodden on, fought over, dug up and broken down for centuries.

— Amanda Craig

Each morning the light came through the slats of the shutters in ripples, and as it washed towards the inhabitants of the Casa Luna it smoothed away memories of the past, It was for this that they had endured long hours in the gray English winter or freezing American climes, for this that they had worked and planned and worked extra hours/ The horrible feelings of stress, tension, anger and frustration that coursed through their veins every day almost unnoticed began to fade.

— Amanda Craig

Every profession is an island whose inhabitants earn a precarious living by taking in each other’s washing.

— Amanda Craig

Familiarity breeds sentiment before contempt.

— Amanda Craig

Family is all politics. Everyone hates each other’s guts, if they’re honest… Most brothers and sisters try to top each other, given the chance; you always get the worst wars in countries with big families…. People have kids because they go soft in the head, tarts especially. They forget what it’s like to be a kid themselves and want to remember through their own. They don’t want us, not real brand-new people who puke and criticize and tell them to bog off: they want their own frigging innocence back. Furthermore, they want to have their own lives back again, with the bad bits taken out. Quite frankly, they’d be better off with a dog.

— Amanda Craig

Few pretty and privileged young women really understand the essential injustice of biology... For most of her life as a woman, the rules were perfectly clear-cut: other women were the enemy, and all love was war. She had rejected feminism, quite openly, as a crutch for the envious and ugly, and regarded married women as holding the upper hand if, unlike her own mother, they had any strength of character. The weaknesses and dependencies imposed by fecundity had never entered into her calculations.

— Amanda Craig

Hatred bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

— Amanda Craig