From eight-thirty in the morning until eleven he dealt with a case of petty larceny; there were six witnesses to examine, and he didn’t believe a word that any of them said. In European cases there ar...
He went upstairs and opened the telegram; it was addressed to a department in the British Consulate, and the figures which followed had an ugly look like the lottery tickets that remained unsold on th...
Intimacy with one person could do this-empty the world of friendships, give a distaste for women's kisses and their bright chatter, make the ordinary world a little unreal and very uninteresting.
Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.
For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you – with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell – can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by...
The Lord is my shepherd. But if we are sheep why in heaven's name should we trust our shepherd? He's going to guard us from the wolves all right, oh yes, but only so that he can sell us later to the b...
So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flo...
As long as one suffers one lives.
A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced
If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions: he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into b...
I was a correspondent: I thought in headlines.
Sweat cleaned you as effectively as water. But this was the race which had invented the proverb that cleanliness was next to godliness - cleanliness, not purity.
I thought I am kissing pain and pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good you are. You might have k...
We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.
Innocence is a kind of insanity
Old age saves us from the realization of a great many fears.
Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It...