I am everyone’s friend,’ I said. ‘Except to my enemies.
We are always ready to look down on people: it is an abiding pleasure, a poultice for our own sore sense of inferiority.
If all you bastards are on the side of God then I’m glad I belong to the other shop.
Why are we fighting? We’re fighting because we’re soldiers. That’s simple enough, isn’t it? For what cause are we fighting? Simple again. We’re fighting to protect our country, and, in a wider sense, the whole of the English-Speaking Union. From whom? No concern of ours. Where? Wherever we’re sent. Now, Foxe, I trust all this is perfectly clear.
What’s this for?’ I said. And this veck replied, interrupting his like song an instant, that it was to keep my gulliver still and make me look at the screen. ‘But,’ I said, ‘I want to look at the screen. I’ve been brought here to viddy films and viddy films I shall.
Violence makes violence.
They were like waking up to what was being done to their malenky persons and saying that they wanted to go home and like I was a wild beast. They looked like they had been in some big bitva, as indeed they had, and were all bruised and pouty. Well, if they would not go to school they must have there education. And education they had had.
Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.
Shined, combed, brushed and gorgeous.
The more sin he sees, the more his belief in Original Sin is confirmed. Everyone likes to have his deepest convictions confirmed: that is one of the most abiding of human satisfaction.
What’s done can’t be undone. How do I fit into this new world? I should have been warned, somebody should have told me. How was I to know that that sort of world wasn’t going to go on for ever?
The human liver, unless it is Graham Greene’s, can take so much and no more.
It is not the novelist’s job to preach; it is his duty to show.
History is a wheel. This sort of world can’t go on for ever either.
Perhaps the ultimate act of evil is dehumanization, the killing of the soul.
Was war, then, the big solution after all? Were those crude early theorists right? War the great aphrodisiac, the great source of world adrenaline, the solvent of ennui, Angst, melancholia, accidia, spleen? War itself a massive sexual act, culminating in a detumescence which was not mere metaphorical dying? War, finally, the controller, the trimmer and excisor, the justifier of fertility?
A flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.
A work of art is somehow organic, and to slash a painting or smash a statue is not just an offence against property: it is an offence against life.
So we got hold of him and cracked him with a few good horrorshow tolchocks, but he still went on singing.
The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet.