By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage.
You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.
Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?
I like to think that each book I start is a completely new departure But I’ve learned that whatever you do, readers will have no difficulty assimilating it into what you’ve done before.
Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.
How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.
It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection.
She lay in the dark and knew everything.
Who you get, and how it works out- there’s so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your conscious choice of a mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily.
He saw that no one owned anything really. It’s all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we’ll desert them in the end.
When anything can happen, everything matters.
What idiocy, to racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak.
Nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning...
She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, roe to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.
It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.
What I’ve discovered and really confirmed to myself is that opera really likes loud colours, and you need something bold, something savage, unpredictable, passionate. You can’t really run a two-hour opera round some muted murmuring.
It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.
And feeling clever, I’ve always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.
One has to have the courage of one’s pessimism.
Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.