We may love our chains and our stripes too.
The room, the wall, trembled with precision, as if the inanimate world were about to utter a word.
He was glad she had come; she was for him, as he for her, ‘another place’.
I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.
I adore your jealousy, especially when it’s so misplaced. I expect Shakespeare wrote a sonnet about that.
A childhood hatred, like a childhood love, can last a lifetime.
I just hope – if he does come – it won’t be some sort of horror show.
Maybe there are times when one should welcome defeat, tell it to come right in and sit down.
He felt himself falling into a state, very common when he was younger, of being totally cut off from the society he was in.
We’re just living on our emotions and eating each other.
There are things which are appalling to young people because young people think life should be happy and free. But life is never really happy and free in any beautiful sense. Happiness is a weak and paltry thing and perhaps”freedom” has no meaning. There are great patterns in which we are involved, and destinies which belong to us and which we love even in the moment when they destroy us.
Mercifully one forgets one’s love affairs as one forgets one’s dreams.
The virtues have secret names: they are, so difficult of access, secret things. Everything that is worthy is secret.
How sad for those who cannot enjoy what are after all prime pleasures of daily life, and perhaps for some the only ones, eating and drinking.
I said, “Your brother is in bed with my wife.” I added, “I just took them up some wine in bed.
I must proceed to my next mystery and for the moment forget this one completely.
Oh what a mad business, no good can come of it, only chaos, and not just chaos but evil. How did we gradually get entangled in such a terribly dangerous shambles!
Or was some act of revenge still pending, some thunderbolt long cherished and prepared?
Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.
Good-bye to the past, with its mysteries which would never be fully unfolded.