Perhaps, all these years, the historiographers had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral, perhaps because a spiral was so difficult to describe. Easier to photograph the spiral from the top, easier to flatten the spring into a coil.
You can viddy that everything in this wicked world counts. You can pony that one thing always leads to another. Right right right.
And now, talking of praying, I realise sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer.
Regional dialects have to become national tongues before they can attain lasting glory. As with America, as with Australia. Scottish is different because Scotland considers itself to be a nation. Its language deserves a chapter to itself.
Some of us have to fight. There are great traditions of liberty to defend. I am no partisan man. Where I see the infamy I seek to erase it. Party names mean nothing. The tradition of liberty means all. The common people will let it go, oh yes. They will sell liberty for a quieter life. That is why they must be prodded, prodded-.
One can die but once. Dim died before he was born.
When we’re healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea.
The old days are dead and gone days. For what I did in the past I have been punished. I have been cured.
To turn a decent young man into a piece of clockwork should not, surely, be seen as any triumph for any government, save one that boasts of its repressiveness.
Power power, everybody like wants power.
But now as I end this story, brothers, I am not young, not no longer, oh no. Alex like groweth up, oh yes.
There’s the mackerel of the cornflake for you, you dirty reader of filth and nastiness.
Speak up for me, sir, for I’m not so bad. I was led on by the treachery of others.
Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
Choice,’ rumbled a rich deep goloss. I viddied it belonged to the prison charlie. ‘He has no real choice, has he? Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.
Because I’m too drunk to feel the pain if you hit me, and if you kill me I’ll be glad to be dead.
Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory.
Reason and faith, the Archbishop said, do not of necessity cohere. Reason saith that water will not be transformed to wine. Faith has a contrary answer.
And so I hunger for something that is permanent, something that will last forever. Truth, I am told, is a thing that will last forever.
I see you have books under your arm, brother. It is indeed a rare pleasure these days to come across somebody that still reads, brother.