Great Throughts Treasury

"He had no wish to obliterate anything he had written, but he would dearly have liked to revise it, envying painters, who are allowed to return to the same theme time and time again, clarifying and enriching until they have done all they can with it. A novelist is condemned to provide a succession of novelties, new names for characters, new incidents for his plots, new scenery; but, Mr. Pinfold maintained, most men harbor the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters — Dickens and Balzac even — were flagrantly guilty."

"He lay back for a little in his bed thinking about the smells of foodÂ… of the intoxicating breath of bakeries and dullness of bunsÂ… He planned dinners, of enchanting aromatic foodsÂ… endless dinners, in which one could alternate flavor with flavor from sunset to dawn without satiety, while one breathed great draughts of the bouquet of brandy."

"Have you at any time been detained in a mental home or similar institution? If so, give particulars.' 'I was at Scone College, Oxford, for two years,' said Paul."

"He lit his cigar and sat back at peace with the world; I, too, was at peace in another world than his. We both were happy. He talked of Julia and I heard his voice, unintelligible at a great distance, like a dog's barking miles away on a still night."

"He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich."

"He did not fail in love, but he lost the joy of it."

"He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive."

"He was talking very excitedly to me, said the Vicar, about some apparatus for warming a church in Worthing and about the Apostolic Claims of the Church of Abyssinia. I confess I could not follow him clearly. He seems deeply interested in Church matters. Are you quite sure he is right in the head? I have noticed again and again since I have been in the Church that lay interest in ecclesiastical matters is often a prelude to insanity."

"He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole."

"His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death."

"His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word."

"How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation. There is no candour in a story of early manhood which leaves out of account the home-sickness for nursery morality, the regrets and resolutions of amendment, the black hours which, like zero on the roulette table, turn up with roughly calculable regularity.""

"His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz--everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. . . ."

"Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified."

"I can never understand how two men can write a book together; to me, that's like three people getting together to have a baby."

"Here I am,' I thought, 'back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity."

"I can't bare you when you're not amusing."

"I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression."

"I can quite understand that many people may be depressed by the spectacle of naked humanity. Personally I cannot see that an ugly body is any more offensive than an ugly dress."

"I don't believe that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn't been told about it. It's like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn't been told it existed."

"I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience."

"'I couldn't understand why God had made the world at all...' I asked my bishop; he didn't know. He said that he didn't think the point arose as far as my practical duties as a parish priest were concerned."

"I can't spare you a whole rosary, you know. Just a decade. I've got such a long list of people. I take them in order and they get a decade about once a week."

"I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behavior."

"I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world."

"I do not believe the expenditure of $2.50 for a book entitles the purchaser to the personal friendship of the author."

"I had been there before; I knew all about it."

"I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits."

"I have been here before, I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendor, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest."

"I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets; I shall live long."

"I knew Sebastian by sight long before I met him. That was unavoidable for, from his first week, he was the most conspicuous man of his year by reason of his beauty, which was arresting, and his eccentricities of behavior, which seemed to know no bounds... I was struck less by his looks than by the fact that he was carrying a large teddy-bear."

"I haven't been to sleep for over a year. That's why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn't sleep."

"I knew what she meant, and in that moment felt as though I had shaken off some of the dust and grit of ten dry years; then and always, however she spoke to me, in half sentences, single words, stock phrases of contemporary jargon, in scarcely perceptible movements of eyes or lips or hands, however inexpressible her thought, however quick and far it had glanced from the matter in hand, however deep it had plunged, as it often did, straight from the surface to the depths, I knew; even that day when I still stood on the extreme verge of love, I knew what she meant."

"I put the words down and push them a bit."

"I never see you now,’ she said. ‘I never seem to see anyone I like. I don’t know why.’ But she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years; as though, too, before our parting we had been firm friends. It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire."

"I said to the doctor, who was with us daily. 'He's got a wonderful will to live, hasn't he?' 'Would you put it like that? I should say a great fear of death.' 'Is there a difference?' 'Oh dear, yes. He doesn't derive any strength from his fear, you know. It's wearing him out."

"I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament."

"I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember."

"I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence."

"I think there's almost nothing I can't excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic."

"I think to be oversensitive about clichés is like being oversensitive about table manners."

"I used to know Brian Howard well -- a dazzling young man to my innocent eyes. In later life he became very dangerous -- constantly attacking people with his fists in public places -- so I kept clear of him. He was consumptive but the immediate cause of his death was a broken heart."

"I will not stand for being called a woman in my own house."

"I wonder if you remember the story mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk - I mean the bad evening. "Father Brown" said something like "I caught him" (the thief) "with an unseen hook and invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread."'"

"I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great details of the Flyte family. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, Charles, it has killed you. Anthony Blanche to Charles"

"If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well."

"IÂ’ve always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I canÂ’t shut myself out from His mercy."

"If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that's why they like him."

"If politicians and scientist were lazier, how much happier we should all be."

"If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper..."