I don’t want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.
Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.
People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.
He was discovering that even hatred died a little at the end. But it still lasted longer than desire, longer even than love.
Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn’t capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn’t false.
I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.
Our parents’ generation carried the past memorialized in paint, porcelain, and wood; we cast it off. Even our national history is remembered in terms of the worst we did, not the best.
Time didn’t heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had only if they persevere.
You won’t get love from a child if you don’t give love.
The television image sanctified, conferred identity. The more familiar the face, the more to be trusted.
It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
Violent death erase[s] more than the semblance of life.
She had quickly learned that to show unhappiness was to risk the loss of love.
What is there to be frightened of? We shall be dealing only with men.
Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.
Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.
Benton had a strong interest in helping to ensure that Warren’s home life wasn’t greatly disturbed: his wife was Cornish, and that morning Warren had arrived with six Cornish pasties of remarkable flavour and succulence.
Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.
There are few couples as unhappy as those who are too proud to admit their unhappiness.
If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
The eyes were certainly memorable and beautiful, moist calves’ eyes heavily lashed and with the same look of troubled pain at the unpredictability of the world’s terrors.
All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing.
What mattered at fifty-eight was what had mattered at eighteen: breeding and good bone structure.
Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.
(A murderer about their victim:)”He was an expert in vicarious death. I should like to have been there to see how he enjoyed the real thing.
We all die alone. We shall endure death as once we endured birth. You can’t share either experience.
The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead.
You desire the end but close your eyes to the means. You want the garden to be beautiful, provided that the smell of manure is kept well away from your fastidious nose.
The past can’t now be altered, the future has yet to be lived, and consciously to experience every moment of the present is the only way to gain at least the illusion of immortality.
The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven’t a chance of getting.
Right and wrong stood for him as immutable as the two poles. He had never wandered in that twilight country where the nuances of evil and good cast their perplexing shadows.
It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
Since even the most fastidious among us can rarely escape hearing salacious local gossip, it is as well to enjoy what cannot be avoided.