Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never rea...
We forget very easily what gives us pain.
Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long.
Innocence must die young if it isn't to kill the souls of men
His lips felt dry with a literal thirst for righteousness, which was like a glass of ice-cold water on a table in another man's room.
We praise heroes as though they are rare, and yet we are always ready to blame another man for lack of heroism.
The problem of pretending to be alive.
The act of lust and the act of love are the same; it cannot be falsified like a sentiment.
He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things we...
It is the storyteller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.
If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?
Love had turned into love affair with a begining and an end.
What will we care for the why and the wherefore?
The first dog I ever had was called Prince. I called him after the Black Prince. You know, the fellow who...''Massacred all the women and children in Limoges.''I don't remember that.''The history book...
Marlowe's devils wore squibs attached to their tails: evil was like Peter Pan—it carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth.
I'm afraid of the dark.' And his mother: 'Don't be silly. You know there's nothing to be afraid in the dark.' But he knew hte falsity of the reasoning; he knew how they taught also that there was noth...
I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.
He had no accomplice except the credulity of other men.
He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.
As long as nothing happens anything is possible...