Cambridge exceeded our most macabre expectations ... the arm-chairs, the crumpets, the beautifully-bound eighteenth century volumes, the fires roaring in stoked grates. Each of us had the loan of an a...
Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can't you see what nonsense that is? What's to prevent the bad from being persec...
As a final test, I tried to look Arthur in the eyes. But no, this time-honoured process didn't work. Here were no windows to the soul. They were merely part of his face, light-blue jellies, like naked...
After many a summer dies the swan.
A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seem...
She acted as a kind of rough and ready chemical reagent; in certain combinations she produced certain known results.
He couldn't, as a respectable master in an English public school, have taken us to a brothel. Yet how I wish he had! His introduction to sexual experience would, I feel sure, have been a masterpiece o...
You don't even have a cat or a dog or anything?You think I should? George asks, a bit aggressive. The poor old guy doesn't have anything to love, he thinks Kenny is thinking.Hell, no! Didn't Baudelair...
Why do I prefer boys? Because of their shape and their voices and their smell and the way they move. And boys can be so romantic. I can put them into my myth and fall in love with them.
What’s so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn’t any difference between people —well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what d...
What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.
What is one ever doing anywhere?
This bright place isn't really a sanctuary. For, ambushed among its bottles and cartons and cans, are shockingly vivid memories of meals shopped for, cooked, eaten with Jim. They stab out at George as...
There was nothing to be done with him and his kind - unless you were prepared to shoot them.
The other day I made an epigram. I said, Anni’s beauty is only sin-deep. I hope that’s original? Is it? Please laugh.
The Nazis were right to hate the Jews. But their hating of Jews was without a cause. No one hates without a cause.
Sometimes Arthur talked about his childhood. As a boy he was delicate and had never been sent to school. An only son, he lived alone with his widowed mother, whom me adored. Together they studied lite...
She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too.
Now, for example, people with freckles aren’t thought of as a minority by the nonfreckled. They aren’t a minority in the sense we’re talking about. And why aren’t they? Because a minority is only thou...
Like a long train which stops at every dingy little station, the winter dragged slowly past.