Choose? When do I ever choose? Have I ever chosen?
These might work, fight, even commit crimes to get “their” representatives into power, but after that they did not consider they had any responsibility for their choices. For a feature, perhaps a predominant feature of the inhabitants of this planet, was that their broken minds allowed them to hold, and act on – even forcibly and violently – opinions and sets of mind that a short time later – years, a month, even a few minutes – they might utterly repudiate.
There was a certain struggling fury that went with being jobless, and persevering, and being turned down, that was different from simply being jobless.
Y’know, there’s a very interesting state of Anarchy up there. Everything’s cracking up. That lot of tycoons; they don’t believe in anything. They remind me of the white people in Central Africa. They used to say, ‘Well, of course the blacks will drive us into the sea in fifty years time’. They used to say it cheerfully. In other words, ‘We know that what we’re doing is wrong.
It was from Willi I learned how many women like to be bullied. It was humiliating and I used to fight against accepting it as true. But I’ve seen it over and over again. If.
It seems to me that ideas must flow through humanity like tides.
Not so easy to put flesh and blood on the bones of an intellectual conviction; Martha was remembering with shame the brash and easy way she had said to Joss that she repudiated race prejudice; for the fact was, she could not remember a time when she had not thought of people in terms of groups, nations, or colour of skin first, and as people afterwards.
You have to read a book at the right time for you, and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature.
Your fascinating admirer waits here for you,’ said Donovan, indicating a vacant and grass-grown lot at the corner. ‘Yes, Matty dear, when you’ve gone to your virgin bed, he sits here, in his car, watching your room to make sure of your exclusive interest in him – the whole town’s laughing its head off about it,’ he added cruelly, and glanced swiftly sideways to see how she would take it.
If one is sensible, if one is reasonable, if one never allows oneself a base thought or an envious emotion, naturally one says: Let’s make a foursome!
There is absolutely nothing like love for showing how many different people can live inside one skin.
You won’t change her by making fun of her. You just hurt her feelings.
She could not bear to lie in bed and wait, so she pestered the nurse until she could sit on a veranda, screened by a thick curtain of golden shower from the street, because she could assure herself she was not blind by looking through her glowing eyelids at the light from the sky. She sat there all day, and felt the waves of heat and perfume break across her in shock after shock of shuddering nostalgia. But nostalgia for what?
But far within him something cried For the great tragedy to start, The pang in lingering mercy fall And sorrow break upon his heart. – EDWIN MUIR.
Martha Quest, who thought of herself as so adventurous, so free and unbounded – the fact was, even the idea of picking up a telephone and making herself known to a new person troubled her: she made excuses, she could not do it.
Please don’t be alarmed, you’d be surprised how many charming people are walking our streets, the mere ghosts of themselves.
The parcel was a book from Joss, entitled The Social Aspect of the Jewish Question, and inside was a note: ‘Dear Matty Quest, This will be good for your soul, so do, do read it. Yours thin-skinnedly, Joss.
The two authors she brought with her from that period of reading were Whitman and Thoreau – but then, she had been reading them for years, as some people read the Bible.
When she returned to the office, she found that Mr Jasper Cohen had gone abruptly on holiday. His son had been killed in Spain – he had been shot, near Madrid, rather more than a year before; a friend of his had written, on returning safe to England, to tell his father so.
Do you imagine, Ted, that if you are kind to servants you are going to advance the cause of socialism?” “Yes,” Ted had said. “Then I can’t help you,” Willi had said, with a shrug, meaning there was no hope for him. Jimmy.