Sebastian contra mundum.
How could I have known? There seemed time for everything in those days; the world was open to be explored at leisure.
Ought we to be drunk every night?” Sebastian asked one morning. “Yes, I think so.” “I think so too.
In the week which preceded the outbreak of the Second World War – days of surmise and apprehension which cannot, without irony, be called the last days of peace – and on the Sunday morning when all doubts were finally resolved and misconceptions corrected, three rich women thought first and mainly of Basil Seal.
Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone.
They are looking for convicts, and as often as not they are rewarded by seeing move across the heath before them a black group of men chained together and uniformly dressed, with a mounted and armed.
These men must die to make a world for Hooper; they were the aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot at leisure so that things might be safe for the travelling salesmen.
A blow, expected, repeated, falling upon a bruise with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be borne.
What is a ‘canty day,’ Dennis?” “I’ve never troubled to ask. Something like Hogmanay, I expect.” “What is that?” “People being sick on the pavement in Glasgow.” “Oh.
The just censure of society is accorded to those so inconstant and intemperate that they must take their pleasures in the unholy market of humanity that still sullies the fame of our civilization; but for the traders themselves, these human vampires who prey upon the degradation of their species, society has reserved the right of ruthless suppression.
I don’t know what it means, but I didn’t mean it.
I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.
From this task of ordered discrimination he had been thrown into the ruthless, cut-throat, rough-and-tumble of the Beast’s Woman’s Page.
Under this liberal and progressive regime, the republic may be said, in some ways, to have prospered.
If she apostatized now, having been brought up in the Church, she would go to hell, while the Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could marry eldest sons, live at peace with their world, and get to heaven before her.
The perfect leisure which those people alone enjoy who are untroubled by the speculative or artistic itch.
It was during that term that I began to realise that Sebastian was a drunkard in quite a different sense to myself. I got drunk often, but through an excess of high spirits, in the love of the moment, and the wish to prolong and enchant it; Sebastian drank to escape.
I always maintain a certain privacy on the sea. One so easily forms acquaintances which become tedious later.
There’s a blessed equity in the English social system,’ said Grimes, ’that ensures the public school man against starvation. One goes through four or five years of perfect hell at an age when life is bound to be hell anyway, and after that the social system never lets one down.
I do not seek to scrape acquaintance with Lady Celia; I do not want my photograph in the Tatler, I have not come to exhibit myself.