Alice Thomas Ellis Quotations

I think the meaning of the universe is bound up with the egg. ... I am fed up with the meaning of the universe. Everything starts in the egg and ends in death. I think it's called 'the heartbreak at the heart of things.' But then perhaps our very mortality is an egg and at the moment of death our souls will emerge like damp chicks.

Our only hope rests on the off-chance that God does exist.

Evil and laughter cannot co-exist.

The snag in being married to a person who knows more or less everything is that one gets hopelessly lazy. ... I never look things up in books because all I need to do is ask him, and when he gives me the answers I don't properly commit them to memory because I know if I forget all I have to do is to ask him again. It is rather like keeping one's brain in a suitcase.

when a person implores you to be reasonable what he means is that you should speed round forthwith to his point of view.

I have never had much trouble simultaneously entertaining diametrically opposed propositions, and welcome the possibility that this is not because I have one mind and am out of it, but because I have lots of them, all beavering away on their own.

Optimism is the last resort of those in deep despair. There can't be any optimists in heaven.

Those who live on vanity must, not unreasonably, expect to die of mortification.

One can get very fond of the people one meets in bars. The trouble is they then appear sort of different in the daylight and you realize that taking them with you is rather like taking a goldfish for a walk: not entirely correct, and surprising for the next people you run into.

Adolescence is usually typified by an unanswerable combination of innocence and insolence.