The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine i...
Suffering is not increased by numbers. One body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.
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.
Man made God in his own image, so it's natural he should love him. You know those distorting mirrors at fairs. Man's made a beautifying mirror too in which he sees himself lovely and powerful and just...
It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular...
It's a good world if you don't weaken.
It was like hate on a deathbed.
Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor.
I'm tired and I'm sick to death of being without you.
I wouldn't like to be cremated', she said.'You'd prefer worms?''Yes, I would.
Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly and to the point people always seem to speak on the stage or on the screen, while in real life we stu...
He was like a child with haemophilia: every contact drew blood.
He had opened the book at random several times, seeking a sortes Virgilianae, before he chose the sentences on which his code was to be based. 'You say: I am not free. But I have lifted my hand and le...
Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.
I can't talk you in terms of time --your time and my time are different
Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width...
If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another name?
Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.
You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.'Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.
When you're not a good man yourself you respect a good man. Now I'd prefer to die with a good man around. A good man teaches a lot of nonsense and a bad man teaches truth [...] I'm not the one to teac...