53 quotes found
“He crosses the front room, which he calls his study, and comes down the staircase. The stairs turn a corner; they are narrow and steep. You can touch both handrails with your elbows, and you have t...”
“The prefect evening...lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself sleepy...Jim lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their ...”
“The supermarket is still open; it won't close till midnight. It is brilliantly bright. Its brightness offers sanctuary from loneliness and the dark. You could spend hours of your life here, in a st...”
“I had failed him; I knew it. But I could do no more. It was beyond my strength.That night, I think, he explored the uttermost depths of his loneliness.”
“Most of the time, thank goodness, we suffer quite stupidly and unreflectingly, like the animals.”
“Up the coast a few miles north, in a lava reef under the cliffs, there are a lot of rock pools. You can visit them when the tide is out. Each pool is separate and different, and you can, if you are...”
“Write, live what happens; Life is too sacred for invention though we may lie about it sometimes, to heighten it.”
“[EM] Forster was the only living writer whom he would have described as his master. In other peoples books he found examples of style which he wanted to imitate and learn from. In Forster he found ...”
“The more I think about myself, the more I'm persuaded that, as a person, I really don't exist. That is one of the reasons why I can't believe in any orthodox religion: I cannot believe in my own so...”
“Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now. ...”
“That is what War is, I thought: two ships pass each other, and nobody waves his hand.”
“Despair is something horribly simple.”
“Chalmers, thanks to Baudelaire, knew all about Taffreuse Juive, opium, absinthe, negresses, Lesbos and the metamorphoses of the vampire ... Needless to say, Chalmers and myself were both virgins, i...”
“... he couldn't, as a respectable master in an English public school, have taken us to a brothel. Yet how I wish he had! His introduction to sexual experience would, I feel sure, have been a master...”
“For other people, I can't speak - but, personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But t...”
“So now George has arrived. He is not nervous inthe least. As he gets out of his car, he feels an upsurge of energy, of eagerness for the play to begin. And he walks eagerly, with a springy step, al...”
“The pain of hunger beneath everything. At the end of all love-making, the dreamless sleep after the orgasm, which is like death.”
“It seemed to me then that to have published a book - any kind of book - would be the greatest possible happiness I could ask from life.”
“If you really have talent, you know, you'll go on writing - whatever people say to you.”
“But your book is wrong, Mrs. Strunk, says George, when it tells you that Jim is the substitute I found for a real son, a real kid brother, a real husband, a real wife. Jim wasn't a substitute for a...”
