At times, I suspect that the concept of maturity is maintained by a conspiracy of niceness.
And that was all the part of it - the way you were obliged to live. You stifled a groan, you lied about your love, you deceived your legal wife, and all in the name of honour. That was the damned para...
Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away...and forgiveness desc...
When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later....
Of course, there were other sorts of literature -- theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical -- but they were just dry wanks.
يدهشني أن ذلك ربما يكون أحد الاختلافات المهمة بين الشباب والشيخوخة،في شبابنا نخترع مستقبلا مختلفا لأنفسنا،أما في شيخوختنا فإننا نخترع لنا ماضيا مختلفا.
Когда я был моложе, я получал то, что мне было положено. Казалось, в этом и состоит жизнь. И где-то подсознательно я считал, что существует некая система высшей справедливости. Но ее нет. Или если и е...
Да, наистина, ако Тони бе успял да вижда по-ясно, да действа по-решително, да се придържа към по-истински морални ценности, да не се примирява тъй лесно с кротката леност, която отначало наричаше щаст...
The reward of merit is not life’s business.
Historians need to treat a participant’s own explanation of events with a certain scepticism. It is often the statement made with an eye to the future that is the most suspect.
Frangibility
Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later...
What did I care about saving the world if the world couldn’t, wouldn’t, save her?
Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
The more so because, among its repetitions, it is always looking for new ways to prick you.
The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glu...
The ability to see and examine himself; the ability to make moral decisions and act on them; the mental and physical courage of his suicide. He took his own life is the phrase; but Adrian also took ch...
Such was humanity’s self-love, Nadar concluded, that most were inevitably disappointed when they finally saw a true image of themselves.
Style is a function of theme. Style is not imposed on subject-matter, but arises from it. Style is truth to thought.