If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?
One of the troubles is this: the heart isn’t heart-shaped.
Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
A pier is a disappointed bridge.
The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
Perhaps love is essential because it’s unnecessary.
Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
I’ve always thought you are what you are and you shouldn’t pretend to be anyone else. But Oliver used to correct me and explain that you are whoever it is you’re pretending to be.
If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.
And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime’s internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.
Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?
His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in the correct and acceptable fashion.
And that was all the part of it – the way you were obliged to live. You stifled a groan, you lied about your love, you deceived your legal wife, and all in the name of honour. That was the damned paradox of it – in order to behave well, you have to behave badly.
Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn’t what poor items they would be.
I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.
I am death-fearing. I don’t think I’m morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!
Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.
Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence. Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket.
Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.
Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?