It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.
Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.
I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can’t love and do nothing.
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
Thought’s a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?
What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.
The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being – it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
Ο θάνατος είναι πάντα από μόνος του μια απόδειξη ειλικρίνειας.
I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.
You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.
I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.
If I stopped loving Him, I would cease to believe in His love. If I loved God, then I would believe in His love for me. It’s not enough to need it. We have to love first, and I don’t know how. But I need it, how I need it.
You are all alike, you people. You never learn the truth–that God knows nothing.
She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn’t be spoken aloud when you are happy.
Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil — or else an absolute ignorance.
She couldn’t avoid being serious about things she cared for, and happiness made her grave at the thought of all the things which might destroy it.
Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.
If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another name?
disappointment had to be postponed, hope kept alive as long as possible;
She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.
We are all resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.
One forgets the dead quite quickly; one doesn’t wonder about the dead-what is he doing now, who is he with?
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
It is the storyteller’s task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.
You must promise me. You can’t desire the end without desiring the means.’Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.
You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.
But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
There was a tacit understanding between them that ‘liquor helped’ growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.
He was as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he caused others.
Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.
I can’t talk you in terms of time –your time and my time are different
There’s nothing so heavy as books, sir–unless it’s bricks.
I doubt if ever one ceases to love, but one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an author one admired as a boy.
Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.
Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.
I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.
Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.
So much of war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn’t seem worth even starting a train of thought.
They killed him because he was too innocent to live.
It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man’s sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover.
Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death…One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together.
Innocence always calls mutely or protection when we would be so much wise to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
Suddenly watching her feet, so light and precise and mistress of his shuffle, I was in love again.
One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.
Whew,’ he said, ‘I’m glad that’s over, Thomas. I’ve been feeling awfully bad about it.’ It was only too evident that he no longer did.
It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.
When there was a choice between love of a woman and hate of a man, her mind could cherish only one emotion, for her love might be a subject for laughter, but no one ever had ever mocked her hatred.
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in…We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.
But I’m a bad priest, you see. I know–from experience–how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and . . .
Beauty is like success: we can’t love it for long.
He’s satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can’t be satisfied.
… and for the first time he realized the pain inevitable in any human relationship – pain suffered and pain inflicted. How foolish we were to be afraid of loneliness.
Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.
I couldn’t help wondering, is my husband so unattractive that no woman has ever wanted him? Except me, of course. I must have wanted him, in a way, once, but I’ve forgotten why, and I was too young to know what I was choosing.
A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn’t conceive what it had never experienced
He began to realize what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power.
People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person’s habitual misery.
You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.’ I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.
Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God.
She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.
It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.
He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.
In my school, he thought, they learn bitterness and frustration and how to grow old.
The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves. Early reading has more influence than any religious teaching.
… and then beginning to go back to what you can’t even remember.
So much of a novelist’s writing … takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.
The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being- it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. I human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.
I don’t believe anyone who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.
Suffering is not increased by numbers. One body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.
Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow,” Aunt Augusta said, “like some people are only bearable under a sheet.
Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times.
For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation
She wasn’t religious. She didn’t believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, Ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers
New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one.
There is an old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double.
Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.
It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too.
Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.
One can’t reason away regret-it’s a bit like falling in love, falling into regret.
I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.
He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.
Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim
It’s easier to get over a thing” Scobie said, “if you talk about it
I have no talent; it’s just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.
-“-A book takes me a year to write. It’s too hard work for a revenge.”-“If you knew how little you had to revenge…”.
I had seen the flowers on her dress beside the canals in the north, she was indigenous like a herb, and I never wanted to go home.
Opium makes you quick-witted – perhaps only because it calms the nerves and stills the emotions. Nothing, not even death, seems so important.
Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.
But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
A writer’s knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life.
Old age saves us from the realization of a great many fears.
A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.
He had stylized himself–life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.
I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.
Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.
He wasn’t a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people in this country, don’t you, with bullets?
What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?
There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn’t shared.
Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?
Innocence must die young if it isn’t to kill the souls of men
Intimacy with one person could do this-empty the world of friendships, give a distaste for women’s kisses and their bright chatter, make the ordinary world a little unreal and very uninteresting.
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
One can’t love humanity. One can only love people.
It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.
Communists have committed great crimes but at least they have not stood aside like an established society and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.
Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.
Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.
No human being can really understand another and no one can arrange another’s happiness.
Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.
Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.
Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.
No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness.
The truth has never been of any real value to any human being – it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.
A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.
If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?
It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.