Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that lightness of touch which gives understanding of life.
You have to be a product of the product.
Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.
He fell in love with himself at first sight and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful. Selflove seems so often unrequited.
A dance to the music of time.
Self-love seems so often unrequited.
One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.
There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.
People think that because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.
Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one’s dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction. However, in those days, choice between dignity and unsatisfied curiosity was less clear to me as a cruel decision that had to be made.
Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.
It doesn’t do to read too much,’ Widmerpool said. ‘You get to look at life with a false perspective. By all means have some familiarity with the standard authors. I should never raise any objection to that. But it is no good clogging your mind with a lot of trash from modern novels.
Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they’ll marry anybody.
But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned – or everything is – because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be.
Brains and hard work are of very little avail, Jenkins, unless you know the right people.
There is always an element of unreality, perhaps even of slight absurdity, about someone you love.
His daughters had lived their early life in permanent disgrace for having, none of them, been born a boy.
In short, the persons we see most clearly are not necessarily those we know best.
In any case, I had been one of them. If her lovers were horrifying, I too had been of their order. That had to be admitted. ‘It is no good pontificating,’ Mr Deacon used to say, ’about other people’s sexual tastes.
I was relieved to find her attitude to myself suggested nothing more hostile than complete indifference.