Tea. He watched her while she made it, made it, of course, all wrong: the water not on the boil, the teapot unheated, too few leaves. She said, I never quite understand why English people like teas so...
For aren’t lovers nearly always innocent? They have committed no crime, they are certain in their own minds that they have done no wrong, ‘as long as no one but myself is hurt’, the old tag is ready o...
You were there teaching me to squander, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You. But You are too good to me. When I ask You for Pain, You give me peace. Give it him too. Giv...
You can be certain of what you’ve done, you can judge death, but to save a man – that takes more than six years of training, and in the end you can never be quite sure that it was you who saved him.
When we get to the end of human beings we have to delude ourselves into a belief in God, like a gourmet who demands more complex sauces with his food.
When I tried to remember her voice saying, 'Don't worry,' I found I had no memory for sounds. I couldn't imitate her voice. I couldn't even caricature it: when I tried to remember it, it was anonymous...
What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?
Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husba...
These are touchy times. National sensitivities are on permanent alert and it's getting harder by the moment to say boo to a goose, lest the goose in question belong to the paranoid majority (goosism u...
There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic,too,and what he had experienced was vacancy-a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human b...
There I go again. I want. I don't want. If I could love You, I could love Henry. God was made man. He was Henry with his astigmatism, Richard with his spots, not only Maurice. If I could love a leper'...
The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across the cruel ground towards the group of crosses: the dead baby rocked on her back. When she reached the tallest cross she unhooked th...
The Mayor about the fable of the Prodigal Son:'But he came home.''Yes, his courage failed him. He felt very alone on that pig farm. There was no branch of the Party to which he could look for help. h...
She had always called me ‘you.’ ‘Is that you?’ on the telephone, ‘Can you? Will you? Do you?’ so that I imagined, like a fool, for a few minutes at a time, there was only one ‘you’ in the world and th...
Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness tha...
It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.
I'm not involved, not involved, I repeated. It has been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fello...
I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.
I like to change my clothes as little as possible. I suppose some people would say the same of my ideas, the bank had taught me to be wary of whims.
I couldn't resist the temptation to tease Pyle - it is, after all, the weapon of weakness and I was weak.