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...
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...
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.
The more bare a life is, the more we fear change.
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.
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...
A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced
Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
Old age saves us from the realization of a great many fears.
I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but o...
To each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory...
In my school, he thought, they learn bitterness and frustration and how to grow old.
He disapproved, he didn't believe in girls drinking, he was full of the conventions of a generation older than himself. Of course one drank oneself, one fornicated, but one didn't lie with a friend's...