An exceedingly well-informed report,’ said the General. ‘You have given yourself the trouble to go into matters thoroughly, I see. That is one of the secrets of success in life.
Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.
One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.
In any case the friendships of later life, in contrast wih those negotiated before thirty, are apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions.
What a shabby lot of highbrows have turned out tonight,” he said, when he saw us. “It makes me ashamed to be one.
Barnby always dismissed the idea of intelligence in a woman as no more than a characteristic to be endured.
Daydreams of wealth or women must have given Carolo that faraway look which never left him; sad and silent, he contemplated huge bank balances and voluptuous revels.
Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they’ll marry anybody.
Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them.
In the break-up of a marriage the world inclines to take the side of the partner with most vitality, rather than the one apparently least to blame.
…in those days children were rather out of fashion.
I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.
Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.
Entering the front door, you were at once assailed by a nightmare of cheerlessness and squalor, all the sordid melancholy, at its worst, of any nest of bedrooms where only men sleep;
There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.
There is always a real and an imaginary person you are in love with; sometimes you love one best, sometimes the other.
Bring a torch, if you’ve got one. It’s as dark as hell and stinks of something far worse than cheese.
It was [Hugh’s] omnipresent fear that some woman might be foisted on him who would turn out to be an adventuress and would blackmail him. This preoccupation made it almost impossible for him to engage a secretary.
He [Widmerpool] moistened his lips, though scarcely perceptibly. I thought his mixture of secretiveness and curiosity quite intolerable.
In the seven years or so that had passed since I had last seen him, Sir Magnus Donners had grown not so much older in appearance, as less like a human being.
One’s capacity for hearing about ghastly doings lessens with age.
Only an atmosphere of quiet hard work and dull, serious conversation were appropriate to him.
There is a strong disposition in youth, from which some individuals never escape, to suppose that everyone else is having a more enjoyable time than we are ourselves;
The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal endings.
Esteem for the army – never in this country regarded, in the continental manner, as a popular expression of the national will – implies a kind of innocence.
Anyway, what can one do here? I am seriously thinking of running away and joining the Foreign Legion or the North-West Mounted Police—whichever work the shorter hours.
Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you have not committed.
One hears about life all the time from different people with very different narrative gifts.
Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don’t fulfill the promise of their early years.