Now his work-mates pitied him, although they tried not to show it, and it was generally arranged that he was given jobs which allowed him to work alone. The smell of ink, and the steady rhythm of the...
It is one of the attributes of capitalist enterprise that an object is no longer significant for its essence but for its exchange value.
Everything grows out of the soil of contingent circumstance. Convenience, rather than the shibboleth of progress of evolution, is the agent of change. Error and misjudgment therefore play a large part...
My great fear has always been complete and utter failure. Hence, you see, all the dispossessed people in my fiction, and why I try to earn as much money as I can. It's a defense. I don't enjoy it or d...
Lonely and isolated people who feel their solitude more intensely within the busy life of the streets. They are what George Gissing called the anchorites of daily life, who return unhappy to their sol...
Dyer. (Looking at him scornfully) So that is why Wits swarm like Egypt's Frogs. If I were a Writer now, I would wish to thicken the water of my Discourse so that it was no longer easy or familiar. I w...
The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.
The land was left vacant, and fewer men were available to defend it. So the Angles, and the Saxons, moved westward. Anglo-Saxon civilization was created by a pandemic.
The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banque...
The best years are when you know what you're doing.
He was walking around in circles, the smell of the old furniture suddenly very distinct. There was a newspaper in his hand and he started reading it, paying particular attention to the headlines which...
Ah,’ Arthur cried out, ‘I have never known one month of repose since I took up the crown. I have lost the key to contentment.
You say that it is time to shake off the Mist, but Mankind walks in a Mist; that Reason which you cry up as the Glory of this Age is a Proteus and Cameleon that changes its Shape almost in every Man:...
Yet, of course, and more especially, the executioners themselves became notorious. The first known public hangman was one Bull, who was followed by the more celebrated Derrick. And Derrick must be his...
Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.
The writing of history is often another way of defining chaos.
In the summer of that year two women were stripped and beaten with rods, their ears nailed to a wooden post, for having said that ‘queen Katherine is the true queen of England
As soon as he had left the room and walked into the air, he knew that he would never return and for the first time his fears lifted. It was a spring morning, and when he walked into Severndale Park he...
To be insular is to be independent. But it is also to be alone.
There was no grandeur here, no sublimity, only weariness and gloom.