89 quotes found
Novelist · English · 1940–1992
English novelist (1940–1992)
“...a great future behind him, already”
“My father lost me to the Beast at cards”
“Despair is the constant companion of the clown.”
“At the best of times, spring hurts depressives.”
“Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.”
“I think I want to be in love with you but I don't know how.”
“Those were her best days, although there was always something feckless about her, something so slack and almost fearful in her too frequent smile, so that when you saw Mignon being happy, you alway...”
“And, conversely, she went on to herself, sneering at the Grand Duke's palace, poverty is wasted on the poor, who never know how to make the best of things, are only the rich without money, are just...”
“The crime rates would go right down, I think, if Americans stopped saying: 'Have a nice day,' to one another. At least it would stop me from contemplating violence; when people in shops & so on ord...”
“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of a...”
“She sleeps. And now she wakes each day a little less. And, each day, takes less and less nourishment, as if grudging the least moment of wakefulness, for, from the movement under her eyelids, and t...”
“How pleased I was to see I strick the Beast to the heart.”
“I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves, in all their unreason.”
“It is a characteristic of human beings that if they havent got a family of their own, they will invent one.”
“The lovely Hazard girls', they used to call them. Huh. Lovely is as lovely does; if they looked like what they behave like, they'd frighten little children.”
“These days, you could stage a three-point orgy in the garden and nobody would bat an eye...”
“Child, if such folks awe you, then picture them on the lavatory, straining, constipated. They will at once seem small, pathetic, manageable." And she whispered to me a great, universal truth: "THE ...”
“A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.”
“Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!”
“Swahili storytellers believe that women are incorrigibly wicked, diabolically cunning and sexually insatiable; I hope this is true, for the sake of the women.”
“They had imagined too often and too much and so they had exhausted all their possibilities. When they embraced each others phantoms, each in his separate privacy has savoured the most refined of pl...”
“The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.”
“Oh, the pain of it, thought Lee, thinking about his children, oh! the exquisite pain of unrequited love. The only authentic wound, the sweet curse they inflict on you, the revenge of heterosexuality.”