Indeed, isn’t the whole business of ascribing responsibility kind of a cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonera...
In an ideal world, a young man should not be an ironical person. At that age, irony prevents growth, stunts the imagination. It is best to start life in a cheerful and open state of mind, believing in...
If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?
If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.
I can't do anything to you now, but time can. Time will tell. It always does.
I am the obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into...
How come I can’t make her happy, how come she can’t make me happy? Simple: the atomic reaction you expect isn’t taking place, the beam with which you are bombarding the particles is on the wrong wavel...
His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he faile...
He also loved candelabra.
Had she told him that she loved him? Yes, of course, many times; but it was his imagination—the prompter’s voice at his ear—which had added the words for ever. He hadn’t asked what she meant when she...
Grief-work. It sounds such a clear and solid concept, with its confident two-part name. But it is fluid, slippery, metamorphic. Sometimes it is passive, a waiting for time and pain to disappear; somet...
Grandpa, in his male armchair, deaf aid occasionally whistling and pipe making a hubble-bubble noise as he sucked on it, would shake his head over DAILY EXPRESS, which described to him a world where t...
Freedom consists of conforming to the will of the majority.
For here is the final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is success in mourning? Does it lie in remembering or in forgetting? A staying still or a moving on? Or some combination of both?
Every bird you downed bore pebbles in its gizzard from a land the maps ignored.
Es menos el recuerdo de un suceso que el recuerdo de una fotografía delsuceso. Y hoy día, como hemos perdido altura, precisión, foco, ya no confiamos tantoen la fotografía como en otra época. Las viej...
Do you know what Nabokov said about adultery in his lecture on Madame Bovary? He said it was 'a most conventional way to rise above the conventional'.
But you find yourself repeating, They grow up so quickly, don’t they? when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.
But if you think these are the only categories of sex that exist, you find you are mistaken. Because there is a category which you had not known to exist, something which isn’t, as you might have gues...
But he was a connoisseur of the if-only, and so they did travel. They travelled in the past-conditional.