What you take to be hyprocrisy is sometimes a certain caution, sometimes genuine, though ponderous, childish, sometimes a mixture of both.
They touch life with gloves on. They're pretending about something all the time. Pretending quite nice and decent things, of course. But still...''Everybody pretends,' Marya was thinking. 'French peop...
That's all you're waiting for, isn't it? But no, you must have the slow death, the bloodless killing that leaves no stain on your conscience. . . .
She watched through a slight mist a party of people who had just come into the restaurant, the movements of arms taking off overcoats, of legs in light-coloured stockings and fee in low-heeled shoes w...
She was a shadow, kept alive by a flame of hatred for somebody who had long ago forgotten all about her.
Saved, rescued, fished-up, half-drowned, out of the deep, dark river, dry clothes, hair shampooed and set. Nobody would know I had ever been in it.
Now, money, for the night is coming. Money for my hair, money for my teeth, money for shoes that won't deform my feet (it's not so easy now to walk around in cheap shoes with very high heels), money f...
Let's say that you have this mystical right to cut my legs off. But the right to ridicule me afterwards because I am a cripple — no, that I think you haven't got. And that's the right you hold most de...
It's funny, he said, have you ever thought that a girl's clothes cost more than the girl inside them?
I hadn't bargained for this. I didn't think it would be like this - shabby clothes, worn-out shoes, circles under your eyes, your hair getting straight and lanky, the way people look at you. ... I did...
And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?
One of those long, romantic novels, six hundred and fifty pages of small print, translated from French or German or Hungarian or something -- because few of the English ones have the exact feeling I m...
Anything you like; anything I like... No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us
You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn't. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mi...
Why did you make me want to live? Why did you do that to me?
When I was out on the battlements it was cool and I could hardly hear them. I sat there quietly. I don't know how long I sat. Then I turned round and saw the sky. It was red and all my life was in it.
Unhappily children do hurt flies
There is always another side, always.
Soon he'll come in again and kiss me, but differently. He'll be different and so I'll be different. It'll be different. I thought, 'It'll be different, different. It must be different.
Something in her brain that still remained calm told her that she was doing a very foolish thing indeed.