So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them.
The words of human love have been used by the saints to describe their vision of God, and so I suppose we might use the terms of prayer, meditation, contemplation to explain the intensity of the love we feel for a woman...
Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour.
You sacrificed both of us once to bring me back to life, but what sort of a life is this without you.
He can make a woman laugh. Look how Tooley is laughing now. His father was the same. It’s the best way, Henry, to win a woman.
Our interests were different, of course – tatting and dahlias have nothing in common, unless perhaps they are both interests of rather lonely people.
Whims so often end in bankruptcy.
Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccessful, not money or even power.
He stumbled on an old boot and put his hand on the stones to save himself: they had all the cold of the sea and had never been warmed by sun under these pillars.
When you are miserable, you envy other people’s happiness.′ It wasn’t what I had ever expected him to learn in the Ministry of Home Security. And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.
Henry was living in a terrible insecurity. To that extent his plight was worse than mine. I had the security of possessing nothing.
Is it possible to fall in love over a dish of onions? It seems improbable, and yet I could swear it was just then that I fell in love. It wasn’t, of course, simply the onions; it was that sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable.
But it wasn’t the small Ministry to which Johns had referred, with limited aims like winning a war or changing a constitution. It was a Ministry as large as life to which all who loved belonged. If one loved one feared.
Ordinary life goes on – that has saved many a man’s reason. Just as in an air-raid it proved impossible to be frightened all the time, so under the bombardment of routine jobs, or chance encounters, of impersonal anxieties, one lost for hours together the personal fear.
You don’t believe in Him, do you?’ ‘No.’ ‘Things to me wouldn’t make sense without Him.’ ‘They don’t make sense to me with him.
New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one.
If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the passion, would we have been able to say, from their actions alone, whether it was the jealous Judas, or the cowardly Peter, who loved Christ.
Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times.
Unlike him, she retained a kind of hope. Hope is an instinct only the reasoning mind can kill. An animal never knows despair.
The lieutenant said, ‘Have you seen enough?’ speaking savagely, almost as though I had been responsible for these deaths. Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.
I hope they don’t repeat our mistake and invent the wheel.