Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
In the strict sense I would not call him a writer at all. (...) Crabbin said, He was just a popular entertainer.Why the hell not? Martins said fiercely.Oh well, I merely meant...What was Shakespeare?
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 on...
But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. 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.
They haven't left us much to believe in, have they?--even disbelief. I can't believe in anything bigger than a home or vaguer than a human being.
There are times, aren't there, when Shakespeare is a little dull.
Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God.
It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for l...
I'm only saying I want you to be happy. I hate your being unhappy. I don't mind anything you do that makes you happy.You just want an excuse. If I sleep with anybody else, you feel you can do the same...
I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate,...
I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, yo...
He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.
Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their cour...
Experience had taught him how far their minds reflected each other. But he was the elder, by a matter of minutes, and that brief extra interval of light, while his brother still struggled in pain and...
It's easier to get over a thing" Scobie said, "if you talk about it
You are lovely, brilliant, witty...the incredible words which would relieve her of any need to repay him or refuse his gifts; loveliness and wit were priced higher than any gift he offered, while if a...
There was no scene, no tears, just thought — the long private thought of somebody who has to alter a whole course of life.
The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness.
Oh well, perhaps when you're my age you'll know the heart is an untrustworthy beast.The mind too, but it doesn't talk about love.
Like Johns, I am one of the little men, not interested in ideologies, tied to a flat Cambridgeshire landscape, a chalk quarry, a line of willows across the featureless fields, a market town--his thoug...