The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies. Better to concentrate on one’s own.
The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.
Every persisting marriage is based on fear’, said Peregrine. ‘Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what’s at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower...
This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart...
What we really are seems much more like an obscure system of energy out of which choices and visible acts of will emerge at intervals in ways which are often unclear and often dependent on the condition of the system in between moments of choice.
Art and psychoanalisis give shape and meaning to life and that’s why we adore them. However, life as it is lived has no shape nor meaning, and that’s what I am experiencing right now.
But to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.
Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.
Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.