Race:
The thing was, we were supposed to be English, but to the English we were always wogs and nigs and Pakis and the rest of it. (53)
The immigrant is the Everyman of the twentieth century. (141)
You couldn't ler the ex-colonialists see you on your knees, for that was where they expected you to be. They were exhausted now; their Empire was gone, their day was done and it was our turn. I didn't want Dad to see me like this, because he wouldn't be able to understand why I'd made such a mess of things when the conditions had been good, the time so opportune, for advancement. (250)
Sex:
[Sex with Jamila] It was all pretentious, of course, and I learned nothing about sex, not the slightest thing about where and how and here and there, and I lost none of my fear of intimacy. (52)
As she tugged me towards it and I inhaled urine, shit, and disinfectant cocktail I associated with love, I just had to stop and think. (55)
whether sexual experimentation was merely bourgeois indulgence or a contribution to the dissolution of established society. (148)
Wit:
'Cuba wasn't won by getting up late, was it? Fidel and Che didn't get up at two in the afternoon, did they? They didn't even have time to shave!' (56)
I didn't want to work in a place where I couldn't wear my fur coat. (95)
she hailed a cab - absolute Roman decadence (113)
Now do The Mad Dog Blues for me, please. Brilliantly (139)
But he's not fucking here, unless I've gone blind. (139)
He was quiet and distant tonight, as if he couldn't be bothered with the performace of conversation. He spoke only in murmured cliches, as if to underline the banality of the evening. (199)
But I can't have people - men - telling me what to do. If Pyke wants me to be with him, then I must follow my desire. (226)
I greeted him with a scream which rose from my stomach and flew across the air like a jet. (234)
the socks were perfect - you can always tell a quality dresser by the socks. (267)
Coming of Age:
There are certain looks on certain faces I don't want to see again, and this was one of them. Confusion and anguish and fear clouded his face. (66)
[Eva] Sometimes she became childlike and you could see her at eight or seventeen or twenty-five. The different ages of her life seemed to exist simultaneously, as if she could move from age to age according to how she felt (86)
For Mum, life was fundamentally hell. You went blind, you got raped, people forgot your birthday, Nixon got elected, your husband fled with a blonde from Beckenham, and then you got old, you couldn't walk and you died. (105)
When you think of the people you adore there are usually moments you can choose - afternoons, whole weeks, perhaps - when they are at their best, when youth and wisdom, beauty, poisse combine perfectly. (106)
[reminds me of Gatsby] Like Andre Gide, who when young expected people to admire him for the books he would write in the future, Charlie came to love being appreciated in several high streets for his potential. But he earned this appreciation with his charm, which was often mistaken for ability. (118)
But now, at the beginning of my twenties, something was growing in me. Just as my body had changed at puberty, not I was developing a sense of guilt, a sense not only of how I appeared to others, but of how I appeared to myself, especially in violating self-imposed prohibitions. (186)
You go all your life thinking of your parents as these crushing protective monsters with infinite power over you, and then there's a day when you turn round, catch them unexpectedly, and they're weak, nervous people trying to get by with each other (228)
I thought of how, when I was a kid, Dad always out-ran me as we charged across the park towards the swimming pool. When we wrestled on the floor he always pinned me down, sitting on my chest and making me say I'd obey him always. Now he couldn't move without flinching. I'd become the powerful one; I couldn't fight him - I wanted to fight him - without destroying him in one blow. (261)
Culture:
This was the English passion, not for self-improvement or culture or wit, but for DIY, Do It Yourself, for bigger and better houses with more mod cons, the painstaking accumulation of comfort and, with it, status - the concrete display of earned cash. (75)
I saw she wanted to scour that suburban stigma right off her body. She didn't realize it was in the blood and not on the skin; she didn't see there could be nothing more suburban than suburbanites repudiating themselves. (134)
Pyke's shows were also commended for their fantastic intermissions, dazzling occassions where the fashionable audience came dressed in such style they resembled peasants, industrial workers (boiler suits) or South American insurgents (berets). (160)
None of this seemed like work to me, and I loved to think of what the suburban commuters in our street, who were paying for us through their taxes, would have made of a gand of grown-ups being pop-up toasters, surfboards, and typewriters. (168)
We have class, race, fucking and farce. What more could you want as an evening's entertainment? (189)
I walked around Central London and saw that the town was being ripped apart; the rotten was being replaced by the new, and the new was ugly. The gift of creating beauty had been lost somewhere. The ugliness was in the people, too. (258)
Education:
Most of the kids I grew up with left school at sixteen, and they's be in insurance now, or working as car-mechanince, or managers (radio and TV dept) in deptartment stores. And I'd walked out of college withouth thinking twice about it, despite my father's admonitions. In the suburbs education wasn't considered a particular advantage, and certainly couldn't be seen as worthwhilein itself. Getting into business young was more importnat. Bot not I was among people who wrote books as naturally as we played football. What infuriated me - what made me loather both them and myself - was their confidence and knowledge. The easy talk of art, theatre, architecure, travel; the languages, the vocabulary, knowing the way round a whle culture - it was invaluable and irreplaceable capital.
At my school they taught you a bit of French, but anyone who attempted to pronounce a word correctly was laughed down. On a trip to Calais we attacked a Frog behind a restaurant. By this ignorance we knew ourselves to be superior to the public-school kids, with their puky uniforms and leather briefcases, and Mummy and Daddy waiting outside in the car to pick them up. We were rougher; we disrupted all lessons; we were fighters; we never carried no effeminate briefcases since we never did no homework. We were proud of never learning anything execpt the names of footballers, the personnel of rock groups and the lyrics of 'I am the Walrus'. What idiots we were! How misinformed! Why didn't we understand that we were happily condemning ourselves to being nothing better than motor-mechanics! Why couldn't we see that? (177-178)
