Great Throughts Treasury

"The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action."

"The main characters in a novel must necessarily have some kinship to the author, they come out of his body as a child comes from the womb, then the umbilical cord is cut, and they grow into independence. The more the author knows of his own character the more he can distance himself from his invented characters and the more room they have to grow in."

"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 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."

"The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him."

"The imagination hadn't awoken. That was his strength. He couldn't see through other people's eyes, or feel with their nerves. Only the music made him uneasy."

"The more bare a life is, the more we fear change."

"The Minister had a great respect for Pyle - Pyle had taken a good degree in - well, one of those subjects Americans can take degrees in: perhaps public relations or theatre-craft, perhaps even Far Eastern studies (he had read a lot of books)."

"The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her."

"The more unstable life is the less one likes the small details to alter."

"The old man in the beard he felt convinced was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn't it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damnation with them rather than be saved alone?"

"The picture Cubitt drew had got nothing to do with him: it was like the pictures men drew of Christ, the image of their own sentimentality. ...He was like a professor describing to a stranger some place he had only read in books... when all the time it was a country the stranger knew."

"The old lady knelt, saying her 'Hail Mary'; She didn't believe — but among Catholics even the skeptical are courteous."

"The only building finished in Duvalierville is the cock-fight stadium."

"The pouches under his eyes were like purses that contained the smuggled memories of a disappointing life."

"The problem of pretending to be alive."

"The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief."

"The sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits - love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where the rice birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature."

"The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across the cruel ground towards the group of crosses: the dead baby rocked on her back. When she reached the tallest cross she unhooked the child and held the face against the wood and afterwards the loins: then she crossed herself, not as ordinary Catholics do, but in a curious and complicated pattern which included the nose and ears. Did she expect a miracle? And if she did, why should it not be granted her? the priest wondered. Faith, one was told, could move mountains, and here was faith--faith in the spittle that healed the blind man and the voice that raised the dead. The evening star was out: it hung low down over the edge of the plateau: it looked as if it was within reach: and a small hot wind stirred. The priest found himself watching the child for some movement. When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity. The woman sat down, and taking a lump of sugar from her bundle, began to eat, and the child lay quiet at the foot of the cross. Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?"

"The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths."

"The soap-box orators talked in the bitter cold at Marble Arch with their mackintoshes turned up around their Adam's apples, and all down the road the cad cars waited for the right easy girls, and the cheap prostitutes sat hopelessly in the shadows, and the blackmailers kept an eye open on the grass where the deeds of darkness were quietly and unsatisfactorily accomplished."

"The world doesn't make any heroes anymore."

"The world is not black and white. More like black and grey."

"The word murder conveyed no more to him than the word 'box', 'collar', 'giraffe'."

"The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit."

"There are dreams which belong only partly in the unconscious; these are the dreams we remember on waking so vividly that we deliberately continue them, and so fall asleep again and wake and sleep and the dream goes on without interruption, with a thread of logic the pure dream doesn't possess."

"Then I allowed himself to strike, like his childhood hero Allan Quatermain, off on that long slow Which underground stream bore him on Toward the interior of the dark continent where I Hoped That He Might find a permanent home, in a city where I Could be accepted as a citizen, as a citizen without any pledge of faith, not the City of God or Marx, but the city called Peace of Mind."

"There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared."

"There I go again. I want. I don't want. If I could love You, I could love Henry. God was made man. He was Henry with his astigmatism, Richard with his spots, not only Maurice. If I could love a leper's sores, couldn't I love the boringness of Henry? But I'd turn from the leper if he were here, I suppose, as I shut myself away from Henry. I want the dramatic always. I imagine I'm ready for the pain of your nails... Dear God, I'm no use. I'm still the same bitch and fake. Clear me out of the way."

"There are no coroners in Paraguay."

"There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives."

"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere."

"There wasn't any point in being angry with anyone - the offender was too obviously myself."

"There is an old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double."

"There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief."

"There's a virtue in slowness, which we have lost."

"There's nothing discreditable about jealousy, Mr. Bendrix. I always salute it as the mark of true love."

"There's nothing so heavy as books, sir--unless it's bricks."

"There's no such thing as gratitude in politics."

"They are always saying God loves us. If that's love I'd rather have a bit of kindness."

"There's only things, Blackie."

"They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there."

"They don't want communism."

"They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered."

"They think my mother's ashes are marijuana."

"They haven't left us much to believe in, have they?--even disbelief. I can't believe in anything bigger than a home or vaguer than a human being."

"They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about."

"They deserved nothing less than the truth--a vacant universe and a cooling world, the right to be happy in any way they chose."

"They don't believe in anything either. You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren't interested."

"They want enough rice, I said. They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want our white skins around telling them what they want."

"This was hell then; it wasn't anything to worry about: it was just his own familiar room."