Heaven lies around us in our infancy.
The Navy’s a very gentlemanly business. You fire at the horizon to sink a ship and then you pull people out of the water and say, ‘Frightfully sorry, old chap.’
One’s intelligence may march about and about a problem, but the solution does not come gradually into view. One moment it is not. The next it is there.
Philosophy and Religion-what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?
I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.
I do think that art that doesn’t communicate is useless.
Put simply the novel stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service a novel renders.
Together, joined in effort by the burden, they staggered up the last steep of the mountain. Together, they chanted One! Two! Three! and crashed the log on to the great pile. Then they stepped back, laughing with triumphant pleasure...
The greatest pleasure is not – say – sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity – well, that’s the job of the writer.
Couldn’t a fire outrun a galloping horse?
There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.
We just got to go on, that’s all. That’s what grownups would do.
How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?
We’re all mad, the whole damned race. We’re wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we’re all mad and in solitary confinement.
What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
Which is better – to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is? Which is better – to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill? Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
But forgiveness must not only be given but received also.
The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.
I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.
He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.