My second wife - I was still young then - she left me, and I made the mistake of winning her back. It took me years to lose her again after that. She was a good woman. It is not easy to lose a good wo...
Lust is not the worst thing. It is because any day, any time, lust may turn into love that we have to avoid it. And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.
Knowledge was the great thing--not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but d...
It's always the same wherever one goes- it's not the most powerful rulers who have the happiest populations
It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
It was as if she had spoken slightingly of a woman he loved. For he dreamed of peace by day and night. Once in sleep it had appeared to him as the great glowing shoulder of the moon heaving across his...
It seemed odd that a man's smell should cling in the folds of a curtain so long after the man himself had become dead matter, a gas, a decay.
It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger an...
It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, a...
In the taxi I let my hand lie on her leg like a promise, but I had no intention of keeping my promise.
In Gower Street they were sweeping up glass, and a building smoked into the new day like a candle which some late reveler had forgotten to snuff.
If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.
If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire.
If one knew, he wondered, the facts,would one have to pity even the planets? If one reached what they called the heart of the matter?
If ash-trays could speak, sir.' 'Indeed, yes.
I was an only child. It's a great disadvantage being an only child.
I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look around at the little...
I had committed myself: without love I'd have to go through the gestures of love.
How can I make a stranger see her as she stopped in the hall at the foot of the stairs and turned to us? I have never been able to describe even my fictitious characters except by their actions. It ha...
He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.