It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.
It made no sense, she knew, arranging flowers before the water was in — but there it was; she couldn't resist moving them around, and not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, es...
In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long.
In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world.
I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, ...
How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.
He's feeling a pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It's a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to the generality, to a community of a...
Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.
Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of h...
Being late was a special kind of modern suffering, with blended elements of rising tension, self-blame, self-pity, misanthropy, and a yearning for what could not be had outside theoretical physics: ti...
As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.
I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.
When she found a place of her ownand packed her bags he asked her to marry him. She kissed him, and quoted in his ear,He married a woman to stop her getting away, Now she’s there all day.
What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?
What a stroke of luck, that the woman he loves is also his wife.
We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth
Was it boredom or sadism that made the shirt service people do up every single button?
This is the pre-verbal language that linguists call Mentalese. Hardly a language, more a matrix of shifting patterns, consolidating and compressing meaning in fractions of a second, and blending it in...
This is how the entire course of life can be changed – by doing nothing. On Chesil beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to...
They had had half an hour. He walked with her to Whitehall, toward the bus stop. In the precious final minutes he wrote out his address for her, a bleak sequence of acronyms and numbers. then, at last...