They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair’s about, and you gave him money and York Harding’s books on the East and said, ‘Go ahead. Win the East for democracy.’ He never saw anything he hadn’t heard in a lecture hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of him.
The thought of retirement set his nerves twitching and straining: he always prayed that death would come first.
The believer will fight another believer over a shade of difference; the doubter fights only with himself.
I’m not involved, not involved,” I repeated. It has been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action – even an opinion is a kind of action.
The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner – the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic.
There are men whom one has an irresistible desire to tease: men whose virtues one doesn’t share.
He began to realize what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power.
He had received already a larger dose of life than he had bargained for, and he was scared.
I have never met a simple man. Not even in the confessional, though I used to sit there for hours on end. Man was not created simple. When I was a young priest, I used to try to unravel what motives a man or woman had, what temptations and self-delusions. But I soon learned to give all that up, because there was never a straight answer. No one was simple enough for me to understand. In the end I would just say, ‘Three Our Fathers, Three Hail Marys. Go in peace.
D. felt a little envious of him as he stood there in the yard among the cars – he looked established. Five hundred years of inbreeding had produced him, set him against an exact background, made him at home, and at the same a time haunted – by the vices of ancestors and the tastes of the past.
They killed him because he was too innocent to live.
In a common situation, I suppose we all behave much alike and use the same words.
One can’t always be wise, can one, in a world like this?
The Captain turned away from the mirror and said, ‘Thank God, I’m not in danger of prison here. I’m only in danger of death.
So much of war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn’t seem worth even starting a train of thought.
He had no accomplice except the credulity of other men.
Nadie puede soportar que no lo perdonen. Ese es el privilegio de Dios.
Innocence must die young if it isn’t to kill the souls of men.
The gulls swept over Dover. They sailed out like flakes of the fog, and tacked back towards the hidden town, while the siren mourned with them: other ships replied, a whole wake lifted up their voices – for whose death?
If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions: he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it.