The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?
If you don’t see misery you don’t believe in it. You can give anyone pain from a distance.
I want ordinary corrupt human love.
One of the few remarks of age which I noticed in my aunt was her readiness to abandon one anecdote while it was yet unfinished for another.
When you have a child you are condemned to be a father for life. They go away from you. You can’t go away from them.
That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins – impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity – cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all.
It is odd how reassuring conversation is, especially on abstract subjects: it seems to normalize the strangest surroundings.
Pain belongs to you as happiness never does.
Registration and cremation, they go together.
Disbelief could be a product of hysteria just as much as belief.
If God had been like a toad, you could have rid the globe of toads, but when God was like yourself, it was no good being content with stone figures – you had to kill yourself among the graves.
How strange it is to be liked. It automatically awakens a certain loyalty.
Because I couldn’t bear the thought of her so much as touching another man, I feared it all the time, and I saw intimacy in the most casual movement of her hand.
How good You are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain.
Age, Henry, may a little modify our emotions – it does not destroy them.
Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful and in his trade my father was a success. If a client didn’t like my father’s manner or his estimates, he could go elsewhere. My father wouldn’t have cared. Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccessful, not money or even power.
Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood – for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.
She had a lot to learn, in the way of books and music and how to dress and talk, but she would never have to learn humanity.
Looking at her over my whisky I thought how odd it was that felt no desire for her at all. It was as if quite suddenly after all the promiscuous years I had grown up. My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust for ever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.
If I hate her so much as I sometimes do, how can I love her? Can one really hate and love? Or is it only myself that I really hate?
The supporters of the proletarian revolution have staked their lives on a philosophy. It is the only reason they have for going on with the grim job of living. You cannot accept them to admit even to themselves that Russia has proved them wrong – or Mexico – without the comfort of a dramatic conversion to some other faith. Nobody can endure existence without a philosophy.