It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.
Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn’t being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love – it’s being unhappy together.
I thought I am kissing pain and pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good you are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain.
When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It’s just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.
There was a tacit understanding between them that ‘liquor helped’; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.
Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
This was hell then; it wasn’t anything to worry about: it was just his own familiar room.
He opened the book at random, or so he believed, but a book is like a sandy path which keeps the indent of footsteps.
His question reminded me of how easy he had been to deceive, so easy that he seemed to me almost a conniver at his wife’s unfaithfulness, as the man who leaves loose banknotes in a hotel bedroom connives at theft, and I hated him for the very quality which had once helped my love.
I wished I had been able to make her look that way, but it is the destiny of a lover to watch unhappiness hardening like a cast around his mistress.
God loves you, they say in the churches, God is everything. People who believe that don’t need admiration, they don’t need to sleep with a man, they feel safe. But I can’t invent a belief.
I am interested in the blueness of the cheese.
If ash-trays could speak, sir.′ ‘Indeed, yes.
I recognized my work for what it was – as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry?