The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness.
The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves. Early reading has more influence than any religious teaching.
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 nothin...
So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days.
Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?
One can't always be wise, can one, in a world like this?
Like Johns, I am one of the little men, not interested in ideologies, tied to a flat Cambridgeshire landscape, a chalk quarry, a line of willows across the featureless fields, a market town--his thoug...
It was the hour of prayer. Black-beetles exploded against the walls like crackers. More than a dozen crawled over the tiles with injured wings. It infuriated him to think that there were still people...
It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.
It didn't matter anyway...he wasn't made for peace, he couldn't believe in it. Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust.
Is confidence based on a rate of exchange? We used to speak of sterling qualities. Have we got to talk now about a dollar love? A dollar love, of course, would include marriage and Junior and Mother's...
If ash-trays could speak, sir.' 'Indeed, yes.
I was baptized one foggy afternoon about four o'clock. I couldn't think of any names I particularly wanted, so I kept my old name. I was alone with the fat priest; it was all very quickly and formally...
I thought to myself: 'Is the pain a little less than when I went away?' and tried to persuade myself that it was so.
I know myself, and I know the depth of my selfishness. I cannot be at ease (and to be at ease is my chief wish) if someone else is in pain, visibly or audibly or tactually. Sometimes this is mistaken...
I became aware that our love was doomed; love had turned into a love affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the...
He was as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he caused others.
That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape--anywhere--for anyone? It was worth murdering a...
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.
One forgets so quickly one’s own youth…