「Quotes」

「Boa constrictors in the street, peacocks on the wall. It seems that both at the northern and southern gates of my life stands a deluded woman.」


「There were few occasions on which one saw her genuinely happy, and one of these was when she was putting paint on.」


「If you choose to live like this, it's what you must expect. → I didn't choose. I was chosen.」


「Good-nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all virtues; it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition. by 威廉 Hazlitt from 'The Round Table' (1816)」


「This is London. Nobody thinks anything.」


「It's like a fairy story. A parable, in which the guilty is gulled into devising a sentence for someone innocent only to find it is their own doom they have pronounced.」


「That was what God wanted. And that I'd been told before. I said, couldn't I just play some hymns for us to sing to? And she said that was arguing. And I'd never make a nun if I argued.」


「You write about her all the time, one way or anoter. You use your mother.
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That's what writers do.
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Me next, I suppose.」


「You don't understandably resent it when the professionals lend a hand.
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No, though I resent it when the professionals turn up every three months or so and try to tell me what this woman, whom I have coped with on a daily basis for the past 15 years, is like.
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What is she like?
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瑪莉, as you call her, is a bigoted, blinkered, cantankerous, devious, unforgiving, self-serving, rank, rude, car-mad cow. Which is to say nothing of her flying faeces and her ability to extrude from her withered buttocks turds of such force that they land a yard from the back of the van and their presumed point of exit.」


「Mr. Bennett. Mr. Bennett. That social worker wanted to know my next of kin. I don't want my next of kin broadcast, so I said I didn't have any. Only, they're in this envelope. And you keep it under your hat.」


「The chair goes up on a lift. And in this small ascension, when she slowly rises above the level of the garden wall, there is a vagabond nobility about her. A derelict Nobel Prize winner, she looks, her grimy face set in a kind of resigned satisfaction.」


「Music. How are people supposed to avoid it? You see, I had it at my fingertips. I had it in my bones. I could play in the dark. Had to sometimes. And the keys were like rooms. C major and D minor. Dark rooms and light rooms. Just like a mansion to me, music. Only it worried me, that playing came easier than praying. And I said this, which may have been an error.
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Said to whom?
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My confessor. He said that was another vent the devil could creep through. So, he outlawed the piano. Put paid to music generally. Said dividends would accrue in terms of growth of the spirit. Which they did. They did.」


「Mr.Bennett? Hold my hand. It's clean.」


「It is a van no longer. It is a sepulchre. Even now, I do not venture into this evil-smelling tomb. But I feel cheated that the discovery of the body has not actually been mine and that having observed so much for so long. I'm not the first to witness her death. Now, in quick succession, come the doctor, the priest and men from the undertaker's, all of whom do what no one else has done for 20 years. Namely, without pause and seemingly without distaste, step inside the van.」


「Mr. Bennett? I came into your drive for three months and I stayed for 15 years! Mr. Bennett? Do you know what that is? It's the last laugh.」


「Well, she wanted an ascension. Let's answer her prayers. Stand by, Miss 瑪莉 Teresa Shepherd, late of 23 Gloucester Crescent. Up you go.」


「Starting out as someone incidental to my life, she remained on the edge of it so long, she became not incidental to it at all. As homebound sons and daughters looking after their parents think of it as just marking time before their lives start, so, like them, I learned there is no such thing as marking time and that time marks you. In accommodating her and accommodating to her, I find 20 years of my life has gone. This broken-down old woman, her delusions, and the slow abridgement of her life, with all its vehicular permutations, these have been given to me to record.」


「What I've learnt, and maybe she taught me, is that you don't put yourself into what you write. You find yourself there.」


「Have a bit more in my life. I might even start living. That's the end of the story. It might make a play. What do you think?
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Now I'm here, I think you should stop talking to yourself.」


「Gloucester Crescenrt has had many notable residents, but none odder or more remarkable than Miss 瑪莉 Shepherd, to whom we dedicate this blue plaque today.」


「MISS M.T. SHEPHERD "The Lady in the Van" live here 1974-1989」