Pain is nature’s way of telling us that something is wrong. Patiently, pain goes on telling us this, long after we’ve got the message.
He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction.
To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever.
How many times have I asked myself: when is the world going to start making sense? Yet the answer is out there. It is rushing towards me over the uneven ground.
And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night.
Q: What’s the difference between a Communist car and a Communist proselytizer? A: You can close the door on a Communist proselytizer.
Blood and bodies and death and power.
Marriage is always something of a compromise, as I’m sure you’re now aware. Any long-term relationship is – and one does have to see it in the long term, Charles. No, I expect your mother and myself will never divorce. It’s uneconomic and, at my age, usually unnecessary.
Points of a journey do not matter when the journey has no destination, only an end.
Beneath the clock was an enormous arrow, on which was printed: Change Here For Eastern Trains. But time had no arrow, not here.
It’s a drag, not being young, but at least I don’t have to take a test tomorrow morning.
My calculations about how to stay alive and sane on this particular planet have clearly been at fault. Lots of people are plenty uglier and poorer than me without seeming to mind, without the self-hate and self-pity – the sentimentality, in a word – that makes me such a quivering condom of neurosis and ineptitude.
In a conclusive rebuke to the Nazi idea, these ‘subhumans’, it turns out, were the cream of humankind. And.
All rooms are waiting rooms. Your room is a waiting room. You are waiting, I am waiting. Everything is getting nearer to being over.
In bereavement, make yourself better, not bitter.
How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist’s couch or even the lovers’ bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall.
Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it’s a full-time job looking the other way.
Is that why the parents of dead children spend half the rest of their lives in darkened rooms? Are they hoping the ghosts will return with all their original power? She.
Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last, you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do.
Novelists don’t normally write about what’s going on; they write about what’s not going on.