How grand, to be a Doctor of whatever and to weigh up and decide people's future.
A time before Flanders and Auschwitz had shown that, given the means of killing and the opportunity to use them, the species, far from being a pinnacle in creation, was actually lower on the scale tha...
The following September I started at the grammar school. This was in a red-brick building of the kind beloved by Victorian optimists. In
We're not really conscious of what we're doing most of the time.
The physical shock took away the pain of being.
Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.
All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles. I held on very, very tight indeed. Because in addition to that feeling, that disintegratio...
The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.
Something had been buried that was not yet dead.
One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.
One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people.
I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.
Alcohol provokes stupidity; opium provokes wisdom.
Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said only:...
The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.
Stephen watched the packets of lives with their memories and loves go spinning and vomiting into the ground. Death had no meaning, but still the numbers of them went on and on and in that new infinity...
Names came pattering into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegrams would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moan...
There was a pretty young woman I used to see pegging out sheets and I worried that she would grow old there and that no one would know how beautiful she was. And maybe she would die without ever havin...
She was so beautiful I had to move away.
Until we can navigate in time, I'm not sure that we can prove that what happened is real.