Great Throughts Treasury

"I have no need to write to you or talk to you, you know everything before I can speak, but when one loves, one feels the need to use the same old ways one has always used. I know I am only beginning to love, but already I want to abandon everything, everybody but you: only fear and habit prevent me."

"I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.'"

"I have often noticed that a bribe ... has that effect—it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman."

"I like to have a secret love affair, a hidden life, something to lie about."

"I know that record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does 'go' mean? If I believed in your God and another life, I'd bet my future harp against your golden crown that in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they'll be growing paddy in these fields, they'll be carrying their produce to market on long poles, wearing their pointed hats. The small boys will be sitting on the buffaloes. I like the buffaloes, they don't like our smell, the smell of Europeans."

"I loved a man, she said. I told you - a man doesn't alter because you find out more about him. He's still the same man."

"I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."

"I measured love by the extent of my jealousy."

"I ought to write funny books. Life is really too horribly funny, but unless one`s an outsider looking on, it`s all such a bore."

"I sat on my bed and I said to God: You've taken her, but you haven't got me yet. I know Your cunning. It's You who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You're a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don't want Your peace and I don't want Your love. I wanted something very simple and very easy: I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed."

"I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all."

"I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewelry?"

"I suppose the love of life which periodically deserts most men was returning: like sexual desire, it moves in cycles."

"I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass."

"I think I have always liked my fellow men. Liking is a great deal safer than love. It doesn't demand victims. Who is your victim, Querry?"

"I think, for the writer, rather as for the priest, there isn't such a thing as success."

"I thought to myself: 'Is the pain a little less than when I went away?' and tried to persuade myself that it was so."

"I tossed up whether I'd see [the critic] or not: I knew too well the pompous phrases of his article, the buried significance he would discover of which I was unaware and the faults I was tired of facing."

"I thought I am kissing pain and pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good you are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain."

"I was an only child. It's a great disadvantage being an only child."

"I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look around at the little I would be leaving."

"I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and change conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. But this hate and suspicion, this passion to destroy went deeper than the book – the unconscious worked on it instead…"

"I want men to admire me, but that's a trick you learn at school--a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire."

"I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings."

"I was Baptized about one foggy afternoon four o'clock. I could not think of any names Particularly I wanted, so I kept my old name. I was alone with the fat priest, it was all done very quickly and formally, while someone at a children's service muttered in another chapel. Then we shook hands and I went off to a salmon tea, and the dog had been sick which again on the mat. Before That I had made ??a confession to another priest generally: it was like a life photographed as it came to mind, without any order, full of gaps, giving at best to overall impression. I could not help feeling all the way to the newspaper office, past the Post Office, the Moroccan coffee, the ancient whore, that I had got somewhere new by way of memories I had not Known I possessed. I had taken up the thread of life from very far back, from as far back as innocence."

"I wished I had been able to make her look that way, but it is the destiny of a lover to watch unhappiness hardening like a cast around his mistress."

"I wondered whether she would consent to sleep with me that night if Pyle never came, but I knew that when I had smoked four pipes I would no longer want her."

"I won't go to Mrs. Henne-Falcon's party. I swear on the Bible I won't. Now surely all would be well, he thought. God would not allow him to break so solemn an oath. He would show him a way. There was all the morning before him and all the afternoon until four o'clock. No need to worry when the grass was still crisp with the early frost. Anything might happen. He might cut himself or break his leg or really catch a bad cold. God would manage somehow."

"I wouldn't like to be cremated', she said. 'You'd prefer worms?' 'Yes, I would."

"I write about situations that are common, universal might be more correct, in which my characters are involved and from which only faith can redeem them, though often the actual manner of the redemption is not immediately clear. They sin, but there is no limit to God's mercy and because this is important, there is a difference between not confessing in fact, and the complacent and the pious may not realize it."

"If a woman is in one's thoughts all day, one should not have a dream of her at night."

"I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever."

"I’m not at peace anymore. I just want him like I used to in the old days. I want to be eating sandwiches with him. I want to be drinking with him in a bar. I’m tired and I don’t want any more pain. I want Maurice. I want ordinary corrupt human love. Dear God, you know I want to want Your pain, but I don’t want it now. Take it away for a while and give it me another time."

"If I stopped loving Him, I would cease to believe in His love. If I loved God, then I would believe in His love for me. It's not enough to need it. We have to love first, and I don't know how. But I need it, how I need it."

"If I'm a bitch and a fake, is there nobody who will love a bitch and a fake?"

"If one is going to write about war, self-respect demands that one."

"If ash-trays could speak, sir.' 'Indeed, yes."

"If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to pity even the planets? If one reached what they called the heart of the matter?"

"If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower."

"If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire."

"If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience."

"If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask [name]?"

"If you live in a place for long you cease to read about it."

"I'm only saying I want you to be happy. I hate your being unhappy. I don't mind anything you do that makes you happy. You just want an excuse. If I sleep with anybody else, you feel you can do the same - any time. That's neither here nor there. I want you to be happy, that's all. You'd make my bed for me? Perhaps."

"I'm sick with life, I'm rotten with health."

"I'm tired and I'm sick to death of being without you."

"In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey."

"In her view when a thing was done, it was done: remorse died with the act."

"In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths."

"In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles."