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.
I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.
The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.
Art’s cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization’s hardest winters.
Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.
Our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.
That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects.
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.