Regret your own actions, if you like that kind of wallowing in self-pity, but never, never despise. Never presume yours is a better morality.
Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find i...
Oh, she doesn't belong to anybody now,' he said, and suddenly I saw her for what she was - a piece of refuse waiting to be cleared away: if you needed a bit of hair you could take it, or trim her nail...
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...
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.
I'm just a bad writer who drinks too much and falls in love with girls
I want men to admire me, but that's a trick you learn at school--a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admi...
He felt the sad relief of a man who realizes that there is one love at least that no longer hurts him.
Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.
Everything had seemed possibile. One could laugh at daydreams, but so long as you had the capacity to daydream, there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities which you dreamed. It wa...
Everyday life seems so permanent and unshakable‒but, as I was reminded by these writers, it can be destroyed by a single phone call.
But you do believe, don’t you, Rose implored him, you think it’s true? Of course it’s true, the Boy said. What else could there be? he went scornfully on. Why, he said, it’s the only thing that fits....
And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be anot...
And yet could swear it was just then that I fell in love. It wasn't, of course, simply the onions -- it was the sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me h...
You talk too easily,’ the Boy said.‘Talk?’ Mr Prewitt said. ‘I could shake the world. Let them put me in the dock if they like. I’ll give them—revelation. I’ve sunk so deep I carry—’ he was shaken by...
You do not always say goodbye to those you love beside a deathbed, in an atmosphere of leisure and incense.
You are all alike, you people. You never learn the truth--that God knows nothing.
When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.
What is cowardice in the young is wisdom in the old, but all the same one can be ashamed of wisdom.
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...