It was some time since I had gone to sleep in the same room with a girl. Of course, the room was large and reasonably well-lighted, and the girl had other things than me on her mind.
The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.
The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.
I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it ourselves.
Never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own.
Some men spend their lives looking for ways to punish themselves for having been born.
The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers.
I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people.
No one looks at the mountains. But they were there, making them all look silly.
The apparent facts, if you like. I’m not a philosopher. We lawyers don’t deal in ultimate realities. Who knows what they are? We deal in appearances.
I like a little danger. Tame danger, controlled by me. It gives me a sense of power, I guess, to take my life in my hands and know damn well I’m not going to lose it.
Flames entered the room like dancers, orange-colored and whirring.
The sea was surging among the pilings like the blithe mindless forces of dissolution.
Pour alcohol on a bundle of nerves and it generally turns into a can of worms.
In wine was truth, perhaps, but in whisky, the way Hoffman sluiced it down, was an army of imaginary rats climbing your legs.
He was half a politician, and like most of his kind he was an insecure man.
On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.