I reread this letter several times. I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness. All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now. Indeed, I didn’t recognise...
I remember what Old Joe Hun said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from actions. That’s in history—Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse...
I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation. ...the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life t...
I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her,...
I loved her; we were happy; I miss her. She didn't love me; we were unhappy; I miss her.
I love you.’ For a start, we’d better put these words on a high shelf; in a square box behind glass which we have to break with our elbow; in the bank. We shouldn’t leave them lying around the house l...
I had a friend who trained as a lawyer, then became disenchanted and never practiced. He told me that the one benefit of those wasted years was that he no longer feared either the law or lawyers.
I didn't doubt for a moment that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own. Further, they seemed to be an organic combination of her mind and personality, whereas mine struck me...
I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not, except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions?
I can see there might be a positive side to this wilful averting of the eye: ignoring the bad things makes it easier for you to carry on. But ignoring the bad things makes you end up believing that ba...
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life...
How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed b...
History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.
History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.
His life had not been wrecked. His heart, yes, his heart had been cauterised. But he had found a way to live, and continued with that life, which had brought him to here. And from here, he had a duty...
His experience of life had left him with the belief that getting through the first sixteen years or so was fundamentally a question of damage limitation.
Her ambitions were no longer specifically for happiness or financial security or freedom from disease (thought they included all three), but for something more general: the continuing certainty of thi...
He thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning...
He loved his mother: doesn't that warm your silly, sentimental, twentieth-century heart? He loved his father. He loved his sister. He loved his niece. He loved his friends. He admired certain individu...
He had discovered love; but he had also begun to discover that love, far from making him ‘what he was’, far from spreading deep content all over him like carnation oil, would make him self-conscious a...