It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy – a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.
You put the small thief in prison, but the big thief lives in a palace.
St. Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn’t exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist.
Man made God in his own image, so it’s natural he should love him. You know those distorting mirrors at fairs. Man’s made a beautifying mirror too in which he sees himself lovely and powerful and just and wise. It’s his idea of himself. He recognizes himself easier than in the distorting mirror which only makes him laugh, but how he loves himself in the other.
What makes a man, without hope, cling to a few more minutes of existence?
What are others worth that they have the nerve to sneer at any human being?
Doubt is the heart of the matter. Abolish all doubt, and what’s left is not faith, but absolute, heartless conviction. You’re certain that you possess the Truth – inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T – and this certainty quickly devolves into dogmatism and righteousness, by which I mean a demonstrative, overweening pride in being so very right, in short, the arrogance of fundamentalism.
She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.
It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too.
If I were writing a novel I would end it here: a novel, I used to think, has to end somewhere, but I’m beginning to believe my realism has been at fault all these years, for nothing in life now ever seems to end. Chemists tell you matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall, so what an optimist I would be if I thought that this story ended here.
Regret your own actions, if you like that kind of wallowing in self-pity, but never, never despise. Never presume yours is a better morality.
We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness. It’s as if we were working together on the same statue, cutting it out of each other’s misery. But I don’t even know the design.
When there was a choice between love of a woman and hate of a man, her mind could cherish only one emotion, for her love might be a subject for laughter, but no one ever had ever mocked her hatred.
He had always despised people who thought about the past. To live was to leave behind; to be as free as a shipwrecked man who has lost everything.
I had come into this affair with my eyes open, knowing that one day this must end, and yet, when the sense of insecurity, the logical belief in the hopeless future descended like melancholia, I would badger her and badger her, as though I wanted to bring the future in now at the door, an unwanted and premature guest.
I’m just a bad writer who drinks too much and falls in love with girls.
In Gower Street they were sweeping up glass, and a building smoked into the new day like a candle which some late reveler had forgotten to snuff.
One forgets the dead quite quickly; one doesn’t wonder about the dead-what is he doing now, who is he with?
The Lord is my shepherd.” But if we are sheep why in heaven’s name should we trust our shepherd? He’s going to guard us from the wolves all right, oh yes, but only so that he can sell us later to the butcher.
That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape – anywhere – for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.