To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
I am one in a row of specimens. It’s when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I’m meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it’s the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.
Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
The great majority of modern third-person narration is “I” narration very thinly disguised.
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven’t any choice. But it’s what you say that counts.
People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it’s no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.
I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.
Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.
Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?
Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
They looked down on her; and she looked up through them.
Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.
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.