To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.
People will perish, but books are immortal. (Pompeii)
And the great thing about money is that it doesn’t matter when you harvest it. It’s an all-year crop.
Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.
The destination of the journey could not be altered, only the manner in which one approached it – whether one chose to walk erect or to be dragged complaining through the dust.
Brave words. Easy to write when one was young and death was still skulking over a distant hill somewhere… – Pg. 82
Outwardly, I hope, I wear my usual mask of detachment, even irony, for there has never been a situation,however dire, even this one, that did not strike me as containing at least some element of the human comedy.
Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called ‘heightened interrogation’. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated the presence of a doctor.
…it has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the mediocre…
Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually. – Pg. 195
Officially it was almost spring but someone had forgotten to pass the news on to winter.