What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days--and yet in those days he had been comparatively innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins--impatience...
We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve ca...
They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a cert...
There is an old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double.
There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.
There are dreams which belong only partly in the unconscious; these are the dreams we remember on waking so vividly that we deliberately continue them, and so fall asleep again and wake and sleep and...
Then he allowed himself to strike, like his childhood hero Allan Quatermain, off on that long slow underground stream which bore him on toward the interior of the dark continent where he hoped that he...
The thought of retirement set his nerves twitching and straining: he always prayed that death would come first.
The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.
Ten years ago he would have followed her, but middle-age is the period of sad caution.
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.
So much of war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn't seem worth even starting a train of thought.
So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.
People who like quotations love meaningless generalisations.
People change,' she said'Oh, no they don't. Look at me. I've never changed. It's like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you'll still read Brighton. That's human nature.
One can't always be wise, can one, in a world like this?
Oh, it's not done,' I said, 'but neither is adultery or theft or running away from the enemy's fire. The not done things are done every day, Henry. It's part of modern life. I've done most of them mys...
Oh, and there was pride, of course. It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted.
O God, forgive me - I am a proud, lustful, greedy man. I have loved authority too much. These people are martyrs - protecting me with their own lives. They deserve a martyr to care for them - not a ma...
O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.