I’m afraid you’re all mixed up in my mind,’ I said. ‘I wonder where they are now –’ ‘Married.’ She spoke it as if it were the name of a distant country.
She was a part, an evidence, of some pure uncracked unfissured confidence in the good which was never there for me again.
If only he could be loved by somebody new.
But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell.
It’s all a dream, he thought, one goes through life in a dream, it’s all too hard.
All the effort which he had put into making himself seemed vanity now that there were no more purposes.
Nothing will bring me peace except revenge.
Sometimes he would have liked to pray, but what is prayer if there is nobody there?
You can’t imagine what it’s like when every moment you’re conscious you’re in the most frightful pain.
The world is perhaps ultimately to be defined as a place of suffering. Man is a suffering animal, subject to ceaseless anxiety and pain and fear.
But thinking about wickedness usually just comforts.
I’m not like other people, my life just doesn’t work, it never has.
Brooding about the past is so often fantasy of how one might have won and resentment that one didn’t. It is that resentment which one so often mistakes for repentance.
Why does one never see dead birds? How can they all hide to die?
She did not want to be as before. She wanted great changes in her life.
Of what value after all is a power which one could never use, or at any rate did not know how to use?
But the tomorrow upon which I was to make my decision never, in the form in which I had envisaged it, arrived.
I’d like to to know what it is he’s after, I mean, is it an experience or a thought, is it something you’d put in a book, or die for, or die of?
I think Otto will be rather relieved to be certain that you know. He doesn’t enjoy deception.” I choose the words carefully. “He hasn’t the least objection to deception. He just doesn’t like the process of being found out. It’s bad for his nerves.
Yes, my mother was on about Byron. But who wants to be like Byron? I despise him.