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.
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.
If Shakespeare required a word and had not met it in civilised discourse, he unhesitatingly made it up.
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.
I like nothing better in this world than a good clean book, brother.
Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you enuch jelly, thou.
The religious impulse can be very dangerous. It damages, sometimes permanently.
But when the social entity grows large, becomes a megalopolis, a state, a federation, then the governing machine grows remote, impersonal, even inhuman. It takes money from us for purposes we do not seem to sanction; it treats us as abstract statistics; it controls an army; it supports a police force whose function does not always appear to be protective.
The modern State, whether in a totalitarian or a democratic country, has far too much power, and we are probably right to fear it.
The intellectuals have never been on the side of the workers. Sometimes they’ve let on to be, but only for purposes of betrayal.
The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penelogical theories. Cram criminals together and see what happens, You get concentrated criminality, crime in the midst of punishment.
Their hair belonged to some middle crinal zone between aseptic nord and latinindian jetwalled lousehouse.
One’s first memories are often vicarious: one is told that one did something or was involved in something; one dramatizes it and folds the image falsely into the annals of the truly remembered.
It was very cally and vonny, with one bulb in the ceiling with fly-dirt like obscuring its bit of light, and there were early rabbiters slurping away at chai and horrible-looking sausages and slices of kleb which they like wolfed, going wolf wolf wolf and then creeching for more.
You got used to a bit of peace and you got used to a bit of extra pretty polly.
He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.
Let us have evil prancing on the page and, up to the very last line, sneering in the face of all the inherited beliefs, Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Holy Roller, about people being able to make themselves better. Such a book would be sensational, and so it is. But I do not think it is a fair picture of human life. I.
Connection was the thing, whether through bed, bottle, grand inquisitorial session.