Great Throughts Treasury

"Love had turned into love affair with a beginning and an end."

"Man is made by the places in which he lives."

"Man made God in his own image, so it's natural he should love him. You know those distorting mirrors at fairs. Man has made a beautifying mirror too in which he sees himself lovely and powerful and just and wise. It's his idea of himself. He recognizes himself easier than in the distorting mirror which only makes him laugh, but how he loves himself in the other."

"Lust is not the worst thing. It is because any day, any time, lust may turn into love that we have to avoid it. And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed."

"Marlowe's devils wore squibs attached to their tails: evil was like Peter Pan—it carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth."

"Married people grow like each other."

"Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism."

"Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.' I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement."

"Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb; the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt."

"Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle classes who demand to pray in suitable surroundings."

"My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust forever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love."

"Melodrama is one of my working tools and it enables me to obtain effects that would be unobtainable otherwise; on the other hand I am not deliberately melodramatic; don't get too annoyed if I say that I write in the way that I do because I am what I am."

"Most things disappoint till you look deeper."

"My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action -- even an opinion is a kind of action."

"My second wife left me because she said I was too ambitious. She didn't realize that it is only the dying who are free from ambition. And they probably have the ambition to live. Some men disguise their ambition--that's all. I was in a position to help this young man my wife loved. He soon showed his ambition then. There are different types of ambition - that is all, and my wife found she preferred mine. Because it was limitless. They do not feel the infinite is an unworthy rival, but for a man to prefer the desk of an assistant manager - that is an insult."

"My second wife - I was still young then - she left me, and I made the mistake of winning her back. It took me years to lose her again after that. She was a good woman. It is not easy to lose a good woman. If one must marry it is better to marry a bad woman."

"My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane."

"Never presume yours is a better morality."

"Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn’t love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed."

"Nobody thinks in terms of "human beings." Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing."

"No danger anywhere, it seemed to Rollo Martins of that sudden reckless moment when the scent of hair or a hand against the side alters life."

"Nothing in life now ever seems to end. Chemists tell you matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall, so what an optimist I would be if I thought that this story ended here."

"Nothing in life was as ugly as death."

"O God, forgive me - I am a proud, lustful, greedy man. I have loved authority too much. These people are martyrs - protecting me with their own lives. They deserve a martyr to care for them - not a man like me, who loves all the wrong things."

"Of course, before we know he is a saint, there will have to be miracles."

"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."

"Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away."

"Now when I'm writing it's already tomorrow and I'm afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together."

"Of course,' I said, 'you know her so much better than I ever did.' In some ways,' he said gloomily, and I knew he was thinking of the very ways in which I had known her the best."

"Oh, it's not done, 'I said,' but neither is adultery or theft or running away from the enemy's fire. The not done things are done every day, Henry. It's part of modern life. I've done most of it them myself."

"Oh, she doesn't belong to anybody now,' he said, and suddenly I saw her for what she was - a piece of refuse waiting to be cleared away: if you needed a bit of hair you could take it, or trim her nails if nail trimmings had value to you. Like a saint's her bones could be divided up - if anybody required them. She was going to be burnt soon, so why shouldn't everybody have what he wanted first? What a fool I had been during three years to imagine that in any way I had possessed her. We are all possessed by nobody, not even by ourselves."

"Oh, I’m not a Berkeleian. I believe my back’s against this wall. I believe there’s a sten gun over there."

"Oh well, perhaps when you're my age you'll know the heart is an untrustworthy beast. The mind too, but it doesn't talk about love."

"Old age saves us from the realization of a great many fears."

"One of the things which danger does to you after a time is, well, to kill emotion. I don't think I shall ever feel anything again except fear. None of us can hate anymore - or love."

"One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books."

"Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason."

"Our brother is at this moment reabsorbed in the universal spirit. [Priest at Hale's cremation]"

"One can't love humanity. One can only love people."

"Oh,' the priest said, 'that's another thing altogether - God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around."

"One forgets so quickly one’s own youth."

"One has no talent. I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time."

"One never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one cannot remember what toothpaste they use; what are their views on interior decoration, and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed."

"One can't reason away regret-it's a bit like falling in love, falling into regret."

"Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood—for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories."

"Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?"

"People don't like reality; they don't like common sense until age forces it on them."

"People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery."

"Perhaps his laughter saved them — it must be difficult to shoot a laughing man: you have to feel important to kill."

"Perhaps a novelist has a greater ability to forget than other men--he has to forget or become sterile. What he forgets is the compost of the imagination."