Great Throughts Treasury

"Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn't worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination ... then we fail. The wrong is in that failure even if we are the victims and not the executioners. Virtue is no excuse."

"Pity is cruel. Pity destroys."

"Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved."

"Perhaps it is only in childhood books have any deep that influence on our lives. In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what it is in our minds already, in a love affair as it is our own features that we see reflected flatteringly back. But in childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future. That is why i suppose books excited us so much. What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years? … It is in those early years that I would look for the crisis, the moment when life took a new slant in its journey towards death."

"Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance."

"Politics in Turkey are taken more seriously than they are at home. It was only quite recently that they executed a Prime Minister. We dream of it, but they act."

"Rocinante was of more value for a true traveler than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men."

"Reality in our century is not something to be faced."

"Pyle could see pain when it was in front of his eyes. (I don’t write that as a sneer; there are so many of us who can’t.)"

"Rooms don't change, ornaments stand where you place them: only the heart decays."

"She came out of the crematorium, and there from the twin towers above her head fumed the very last of Fred, a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens. Fred dropped indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms: he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept. [After Hale's cremation]"

"She had always called me ‘you.’ ‘Is that you?’ on the telephone, ‘Can you? Will you? Do you?’ so that I imagined, like a fool, for a few minutes at a time, there was only one ‘you’ in the world and that was me."

"Sentimentality -- that's what we call the sentiment we don't share."

"She couldn't avoid being serious about things she cared for, and happiness made her grave at the thought of all the things which might destroy it."

"She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs."

"She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present – she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation."

"She thought for the first time, with happiness: perhaps I have a life in people's minds when I am not there to be seen or talked to."

"She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble."

"She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy."

"She was his like a table or a chair, but a table owned you, too - by your fingerprints."

"So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work."

"She was proud of her power of prophecy, though she had not yet lived to see any of her prophecies fulfilled."

"Simplicity belonged by right to those who were native-born, those who could take the conditions of life, however bizarre, for granted."

"So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance 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."

"So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear."

"So many of his prayers had remained unanswered that he had hopes that this one prayer of his had lodged all the time like wax in the Eternal ear."

"So much of life [is] a putting-off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing [is] ever lost by delay."

"So one always starts a journey in a strange land -- taking too many precautions, until one tires of the exertion and abandons care in the worst spot of all."

"So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them."

"Sometimes I get tired of trying to convince him that I love him and shall love him for ever. He pounces on my words like a barrister and twists them. I know he is afraid of that desert which would be around him if our love were to end, but he can’t realize that I feel exactly the same. What he says aloud, I say to myself silently and write it here."

"Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue."

"Sometimes I would walk with a sense of pain, sometimes with pleasure. If a woman is in one's thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night."

"Sometimes it's easier to cut your coat to fit the cloth than lie on the bed you've made."

"Sooner or later... one has to take sides – if one is to remain human."

"Suddenly I realized she was asleep. Exhausted by her flight she had fallen asleep against my shoulder as so many times, in taxis, in buses, on a park-seat. I sat still and let her be. There was nothing to disturb her in the dark church. The candles napped around the virgin, and there was nobody else there. The slowly growing pain in my upper arm where her weight lay was the greatest pleasure I had ever known."

"Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline."

"That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer."

"Tea. He watched her while she made it, made it, of course, all wrong: the water not on the boil, the teapot unheated, too few leaves. She said, I never quite understand why English people like teas so."

"That was my first instinct -- to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."

"Sweat cleaned you as effectively as water. But this was the race which had invented the proverb that cleanliness was next to godliness - cleanliness, not purity."

"Suffering is not increased by the number: a body can contain all the suffering that can sense the world."

"That was the worst period of all: it is my profession to imagine, to think in images: fifty times through the day, and immediately I woke during the night, a curtain would rise and the play would begin: always the same play, Sarah making love, Sarah with X, doing the same things that we had done together, Sarah kissing in her own particular way, arching herself in the act of sex and uttering that cry like pain, Sarah in abandonment. I would take pills at night to make me sleep quickly, but I never found any pills that would keep me asleep till daylight."

"The argument of danger only applies to those who live in relative safety."

"That was the difference he had always known, between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the people who cared only for things like the state, the republic: this child was more important than a whole continent."

"That whisky priest, I wish we had never had him in the house."

"The believer will fight another believer over a shade of difference: the doubter fights only with himself."

"The Boy sat silent. It was he this time who was being warned: life held the vitriol bottle and warned him: I'll spoil your looks."

"The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn."

"The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties."

"The first dog I ever had was called Prince. I called him after the Black Prince. You know, the fellow who...' 'Massacred all the women and children in Limoges.' 'I don't remember that.' 'The history books gloss it over."