He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that...
Cast out the beam from your own eye before you seek to extract the mote from the eye of another.
Arthur was frequently baffled by the complacency with which people went on with what they insouciantly called their lives, as if both the word and the thing made perfect sense to them.
And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.
Я хочу встретить такого мужчину, который, когда узнаешь его получше, будет таким же, каким кажется, когда вы только познакомились. Я хочу встретить такого мужчину, который звонит, если пообещал позвон...
You get towards the end of life—no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: w...
When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make y...
What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together
Throw off your grief,' such doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending that death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away.
The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.
The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is bec...
The conservative, the slow-witted and the envious existed in every profession.
The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
Or perhaps it’s that same paradox again: the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it’s the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and t...
Love means never having to say you’re sorry (on the contrary, it frequently means doing just precisely that).
La principal característica del remordimiento es que no tiene remedio: que ha pasado el tiempo de las disculpas o enmiendas
Kiedy jesteśmy młodzi, każdy powyżej trzydziestki wygląda na człowieka w średnim wieku, każdy po pięćdziesiątce na starca. I czas dowodzi, wraz ze swoim upływem, że nie myliliśmy się tak bardzo. Te dr...
Juntas a dos personas que nunca habían estado juntas. A veces es como aquelprimer intento de acoplar un globo de hidrógeno a otro de aire caliente: ¿prefieresestrellarte y arder o arder y estrellarte?...
In the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning (for suicide): that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to exam...