William Boyd Quotes

The wounded, the incomplete, the unbalanced, the malfunctioning, the ill seek each other out: like attracted to like.

~ William Boyd

Lysander saw that they were displaying all the timeworn and conventional feints and poor disguises of lovers meeting in a public place and hoping the real nature of their relationship would be invisible.

~ William Boyd

Mr Lysander Rief looks like someone who is far more at ease occupying the cold security of the dark, a man happier with the dubious comfort of the shadows.

~ William Boyd

I walked out this evening to the bottom of the garden and smoked a cigarette. Last week I planted an acer in the furthest bed from the house, in honour of our new baby. The sapling is as tall as me and, by all accounts, it can grow forty feet tall. So, in thirty year's time, if we're still here I can come back and see this tree in its maturity. But the thought depresses me: in thirty years' time I'll be in my mid-sixties and I realize that these forward projections that you make, so unreflectingly, in your life are beginning to run out. Suppose I'd said in forty years' time? That would be pushing it, Fifty? I'll probably be gone by then. Sixty? Dead and buried, for sure. Thank Christ I didn't plant an oak. Is that a good definition of of marking the ageing watershed? That moment when you realize-quite rationally, quite unemotionally-that the world in the not-so-distant future will not contain you: that the trees you planted will continue growing but you will not be there to see them.

~ William Boyd

he needed the security of other bodies.

~ William Boyd

Meeting Hettie again made him achingly conscious once more of the irrefutable nature of his obsession with her. Obsession - or love? Or was it something more unhealthy - a kind of craving, an addiction?

~ William Boyd