Lovers are like Siamese twins, two bodies with a single soul; but if one dies before the other, the survivor has a corpse to lug around.
Next to not living with those one loves, the worst torture is living with those one doesn’t love.
Is it splendid, or stupid, to take life seriously?
It is better to waste your old age than to do nothing at all with it.
A facetious if logical question comes into George’s mind, from where he cannot tell, unless as a reaction to all this unwonted intensity. 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?
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.
What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love’s favorite perversion.
Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that – if it is not moral in its effect – then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.
The more you learn, the less you fear. “Learn” not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.
Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike’s readable. Hawthorne’s readable. It’s a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake,” before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.
The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.
When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again.
Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.
The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.
The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.
All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.
We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.
Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t.