Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base-in both senses-greed.
I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I’ve become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I’m not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It’s like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll.
But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it’s no go if your personality isn’t worth translating.
If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.
If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.
The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.
That’s the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed – thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes – because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself – and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.
The power of women! I’ve never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke. We’re so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we’re stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can’t stand ours.
We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come.
I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.
Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.
There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.
We all want things we can’t have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you’re going to paint. The most terrible bad form.
I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.
The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.