The soap-box orators talked in the bitter cold at Marble Arch with their mackintoshes turned up around their Adam's apples, and all down the road the cad cars waited for the right easy girls, and the...
Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.
It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers,...
In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness. So Dickens's wife and mistress had to suffer so that dickens could make his novels and his fortune. At least a bank manager's mo...
I have to think of all the possibilities, doctor. Even a crime of passion is possible.’ ‘Passion?’ the doctor smiled. ‘I am an Englishman.
I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil. I have known so intimately the way that demon works in my imagination. No st...
Even though my reason wanted the state of death, 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...
Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim
But we do not love people for what they do for us. Love happens to us; it isn't created.
But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
Be Disloyal. It's your duty to the human race. The human race needs to survive and it's the loyal man who dies first from anxiety or a bullet or overwork. If you have to earn a living...and the price...
She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping...
The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.
You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
That was my first instinct -- to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to gu...
She wasn’t religious. She didn’t believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, Ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers
She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy.
Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil -- or else an absolute ignorance.
People don't demand that a thing be reasonable if their emotions are touched. Lovers aren't reasonable, are they?