I remember I dreamed a lot of Sarah in those obscure days or weeks. Sometimes I would wake with a sense of pain, sometimes with pleasure. If a woman is in one’s thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night.
Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow,” Aunt Augusta said, “like some people are only bearable under a sheet.
He looked with horror round the room: nobody could say he hadn’t done right to get away from this, to commit any crime... When the man opened his mouth he heard his father speaking, that figure in the corner was his mother: he bargained for his sister and felt no desire... He turned to Rose, ‘I’m off,’ and felt the faintest tinge of pity for goodness which couldn’t murder to escape.
Not so bad this ending because one is getting used to endings: life like Morse, a series of dots and dashes, never forming a paragraph.
It’s always the same wherever one goes- it’s not the most powerful rulers who have the happiest populations.
Feeling her against me, I was reminded of desire. Would that always be the case now – not desire, but only the reminder of it?
I was afraid of burglars and Indian thugs and snakes and fires and Jack the Ripper, when I should have been afraid of thirty years in a bank and a take-over bid and a premature retirement and the Deuil du Roy Albert.
You should dream more, Mr Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.’ 2.
One can go back to one’s own home after a year’s absence and immediately the door closes it is as if one had never been away. Or one can go back after a few hours and everything is so changed that one is a stranger.
I have to think of all the possibilities, doctor. Even a crime of passion is possible.’ ‘Passion?’ the doctor smiled. ‘I am an Englishman.
In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness.
Then he allowed himself to strike, like his childhood hero Allan Quatermain, off on that long slow underground stream which bore him on toward the interior of the dark continent where he hoped that he might find a permanent home, in a city where he could be accepted as a citizen, as a citizen without any pledge of faith, not the City of God or Marx, but the city called Peace of Mind.
She always harboured my criticism: it was only praise that slid from her like the snow.
He sat heavily down on a tall tubular adjustable chair, which shortened suddenly under his weight and split him on the floor. Somebody always leaves a banana-skin on the scene of a tragedy.
Intimacy with one person could do this-empty the world of friendships, give a distaste for women’s kisses and their bright chatter, make the ordinary world a little unreal and very uninteresting.
And sitting there, my fingers on the quiet instrument, with something to look forward to, I thought to myself: I remember. This is what hope feels like.
You are lovely, brilliant, witty... the incredible words which would relieve her of any need to repay him or refuse his gifts; loveliness and wit were priced higher than any gift he offered, while if a girl were loved, even old women of hard experience would admit her right to take and never give.
I hate your reasons. I don’t want reasons. If you see somebody in pain, people like you reason and reason. You say – pain is a good thing, perhaps he’ll be better for it one day. I want to let my heart speak... Yes. At the end of a gun.
She wasn’t religious. She didn’t believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, Ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers.
The soap-box orators talked in the bitter cold at Marble Arch with their mackintoshes turned up around their Adam’s apples, and all down the road the cad cars waited for the right easy girls, and the cheap prostitutes sat hopelessly in the shadows, and the blackmailers kept an eye open on the grass where the deeds of darkness were quietly and unsatisfactorily accomplished.