She had only a candle’s light to see by, but candlelight never did badly by any woman.
A look I shall never forget, because it was almost one of hatred, and hatred in her face was like spite in the Virgen Mary’s; it reversed the entire order of nature.
Long afterwards I realized why some men, racing drivers and their like, become addicted to speed. There are those of us who never see death ahead, but eternally behind: in any moment that stops and thinks.
Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind.
That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will.
But I think the most harmful change brought about by Victorian science in our attitude to nature lies in the demand that our relation with it must be purposive, industrious, always seeking greater knowledge.
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else’s imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common – a need to create an alternative world.
Time is not a road – it is a room.
There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.
There are only two races on this planet – the intelligent and the stupid.
The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect.
Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
The profoundest distances are never geographical.
Science disembodies; art embodies.
Always we try to put the wild in a cage.
In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.
It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.