For you I’ll always be Alison who slept around. That Australian girl who had an abortion. The human boomerang. Throw her away and she’ll always come back for another weekend of cheap knock.
Laziness, I am afraid, was Charles’s distinguishing trait.
He has that selfishness – it’s not even an honest selfishness, because he puts the blame on life and then enjoys being selfish with a free conscience.
Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things.
They knew they were like two grains of yeast in a sea of lethargic dough – two grains of salt in a vast tureen of insipid broth.
Because I don’t understand Him. Why He is, who He is, or how He is. And Maurice tells me I am quite intelligent. I think God must be very intelligent to be so much more intelligent than I am. To give me no clues. No certainties. No sights. No reasons. No motives.
But though one may keep the wolves from one’s door, they still howl out there in the darkness.
Its meaning is whatever reaction it provokes in the reader, and so far as I am concerned there is no given ‘right’ reaction.
The honest poor are the moneyless vulgar rich. Poverty forces them to have good qualities and pride in other things besides money. Then when they have money they don’t know what to do with it. They forget all the old virtues, which weren’t real virtues anyway. They think the only virtue is to make more money and to spend. They can’t imagine that there are people to whom money is nothing. That the most beautiful things are quite independent of money.
But the one perfume you really want is freedom.
If you are a real artist, you give your whole being to your art. Anything short of that, then you are not an artist.
So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence.
He uses my heart. Then turns and tramples on it.
That’s the great dead thing in him.
We were equally tired, in mid-century, of cold sanity and hot blasphemy; of the over-cerebral and of the over-faecal; the way out lay somewhere else. Words had lost their power, either for good or for evil; still hung, like a mist, over the reality of action, distorting, misleading, castrating; but at least since Hitler and Hiroshima they were seen to be a mist, a flimsy superstructure.
I had just written a letter to Alison, but already she seemed far away, not in distance, not in time, but in some dimension for which there is no name. Reality, perhaps.
And I’ll tell you what a modern satyr is. He’s someone who invents a woman on paper so that he can force her to say and do things no real woman in her right mind ever would.
The lifeless sea was ruffled here and there by a lost zephyr, by a stippling shoal of sardines, dark ash-blue lines that snaked, broad then narrow, in slow motion across the shimmering mirageous surface, as if the water was breeding corruption.
They’re teaching you to express personality at the Slade – personality in general. But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it’s no go if your personality isn’t worth translating. It.
Either you enlist under the kapetan, that murderer who knew only one word, but the only word, or you enlist under Anton. You watch and you despair. Or you despair and you watch. In the first case, you commit physical suicide; in the second, moral.