The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn’t thought about. At that moment he’s alive and you leave it to him.
I have never planned anything illegal in my life,′ Aunt Augusta said. ‘How could I plan anything of the kind when I have never read any of the laws and have no idea what they are?
My second wife – I was still young then – she left me, and I made the mistake of winning her back. It took me years to lose her again after that. She was a good woman. It is not easy to lose a good woman. If one must marry it is better to marry a bad woman.
And how is Uncle Edward? or is he dead? I’ve reached the time of life when relatives die unnoticed.
Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain – nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures.
What they had both thought was safety proved to have been the camouflage of an enemy who works in terms of friendship, trust and pity.
But if I start believing that, then I have to believe in your God. I’d have to love your God. I’d rather love the men you slept with.
Knowledge was the great thing – not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed, passionate, trivial human knowledge.
What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.
You were there teaching me to squander, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You. But You are too good to me. When I ask You for Pain, You give me peace. Give it him too. Give him my peace-he needs it more.
He was filled with horror at the thought of what a child becomes, and what the dead must feel watching the change from innocence to guilt and powerless to stop it.
It was a city to visit, not a city to live in, but it was the city where Wormold had first fallen in love and he was held to it as though to the scene of a disaster. Time gives poetry to a battlefield.
So one always starts a journey in a strange land – taking too many precautions, until one tires of the exertion and abandons care in the worst spot of all.
I’m afraid of the dark.′ And his mother: ‘Don’t be silly. You know there’s nothing to be afraid in the dark.’ But he knew hte falsity of the reasoning; he knew how they taught also that there was nothing to fear in death, and how fearfully they avoided the idea of it.
When I began to realize how often we quarrelled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed: love had turned into a love-affair with a beginning and an end.
That was the difference, he had always known, between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the people who cared only for things like the state, the republic: this child was more important than a whole continent.
Marlowe’s devils wore squibs attached to their tails: evil was like Peter Pan – it carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth.
Married people grow like each other.
It was not merely that his brother was dead. His brain, too young to realize the full paradox, wondered with an obscure self- pity why it was that the pulse of his brother’s fear went on and on, when Francis was now where he had always been told there was no more terror and no more – darkness.
It was like hate on a deathbed.