After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can’t trust a person.
The worse I am, the more I need God. I can’t shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him.
No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can’t really hate God either. When they want to Hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretends it’s God and hate that.
Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.
Success in this world depends on knowing exactly how little effort each job is worth…distribution of energy…
As my intimacy with his family grew, I became part of the world which he sought to escape; I became one of the bonds which held him.
I am sorry to disturb you,’ said James politely, ‘but these people wished to shoot us.
Miss Runcible wore trousers and Miles touched up his eye-lashes in the dining-room of the hotel where they stopped for luncheon. So they were asked to leave.
Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.
I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith.
There’s only one great evil in the world today. Despair.
All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.
My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.
There is nothing to be gained by multiplying social distinctions indefinitely.
I’ll pray for you.””That’s very kind of you.””I can’t spare you a whole rosary, you know. Just a decade. I’ve got such a long list of people. I take them in order and they get a decade about once a week.
A whole Gothic world had come to grief…there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled…
Aunt Fanny tells me you made great friends with Mr. Mottram. I’m sure he can’t be very nice.”I don’t think he is,’ said Julia. ‘I don’t know that I like nice people
You’ll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first…
I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don’t want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits.
One does not travel, any more than one falls in love, to collect material. It is simply part of one’s life…
Do you want to change?” “It’s the only evidence of life.
When the waterholes were dry, people sought to drink at the mirage.
Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It’s supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though all mankind, and God, too, were in a conspiracy against us.
If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as the beginning of individual existence, this skirmish from which one one’s spurs, from which one set out on the true quests of life.
So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian.
As there was no form of government common to the peoples thus segregated, nor tie of language, history, habit or belief, they were called a Republic.
He was fortified by a memory which kept only the good things and rejected the ill. Despite his sorrows, he had had a fair share of joys and these were ever fresh and accessible.
If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper…
It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.
The languor of Youth – how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!
The problem of architecture as I see it is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from the consideration of the form.
Peter Pastmaster and the absurdly youthful colonel of the new force were drawing up a list of suitable officers in Bratts Club. ‘Most of war seems to consist of hanging about,’ he said. ‘Let’s at least hang about with our own friends.
We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.
Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.
Instruction would be wasted on me. Just to give me the form and I’ll sign on the dotted line.
I’ve always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can’t shut myself out from His mercy.
My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret.
I loved buildings that had grown silently with the centuries, catching the best of each generation while time curbed the artist’s pride and the philistine’s vulgarity and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman.
Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy.
I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.
It (modernization) is just another jungle closing in.
I suppose it’s something to do with her black-brained religion not to take care of the body.
…for in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.
…any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul destroying.
Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us but for ours to amuse them.
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us but for ours to amuse them.
Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.
Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.