The humour of Dostoievsky is the humour of a barloafer who ties a kettle to a dog’s tail.
He was developing a sense of humour, and found that he had a knack of saying bitter things, which caught people on the raw; he said them because they amused him, hardly realizing how much they hurt, and was much offended when he found that his victims regarding him with active dislike.
A perfectly decent fellow may be driven by circumstances to commit a crime and if he’s found out he’s punished; but he may very well remain a perfectly decent fellow.
I ought to have lived in the eighteen hundreds,′ he said himself. ‘What I want is a patron. I should have published my poems by subscription and dedicated them to a nobleman. I long to compose rhymed couplets upon the poodle of a countess. My soul yearns for the love of chambermaids and the conversation of bishops.
She had an idea that he would welcome an uprush of emotion which would liberate him from this nightmare of resentment, but that, in his pathetic folly, he would fight when it came with all his might against it.
I’m one of the few persons I ever met who are able to learn from experience.
I always think it a pity that, fashion having decided that the doings of the aristocracy are no longer a proper subject for serious fiction, Roy, always keenly sensitive to the tendency of the age, should in his later novels have confined himself to the spiritual, conflicts of solicitors, chartered accountants, and produce brokers. He does not move in these circles with his old assurance.
Thank god I’m free from all that now”, he thought. And yet even as he said it he was not quit sure whether he spoke sincerely. When he was under the influence of passion he had felt a singualr vigour, and his mind has worked with unwonted force. He was more alive, there was an excitement of sheer being, an eager vehemence of soul, which made life now a little dull.
I wish to deal only with the masterpieces which the consensus of opinion for a long time has accepted as supreme. We are all supposed to have read them; it is a pity that so few of us have.
I loved flying. I couldn’t describe the feeling it gave me, I only knew I felt proud and happy. In the air, ’way up, I felt that I was part of something very great and very beautiful. I didn’t know what it was all about, I only knew that I wasn’t alone any more, by myself as I was, two thousand-feet up, but that I bebfiged. I can’t help it if it sounds silly. When I was flying above the clouds and they were like an enormous flock of sheep below me I felt that I was at home with infinitude.
From time to time, however, writers have engaged in politics. Its effect on them as writers has been injurious.
At that bureau a lovesick woman in a crinoline, her hair parted in the middle, may have written a passionate letter to her faithless lover, or a peppery old gentleman in a green frock coat and a stock indited an angry epistle to his extravagant son.
I was shocked and thrilled by what Mary-Ann told me, but I had difficulty in believing it. I had read too many novels and had learnt too much at school not to know a good deal about love, but I thought it was a matter that only concerned young people. I could not conceive that a man with a beard, who had sons as old as I, could have any feelings of that sort. I thought when you married all that was finished. That people over thirty should be in love seemed to me rather disgusting.
Irony is a gift of the gods, the most subtle of all the modes of speech. It is an armour and a weapon; it is a philosophy and a perpetual entertainment; it is food for the hungry of wit and drink to those thirsting for laughter...
We paint from within outward – if we force our vision on the world it calls us great painters; if we don’t it ignores us; but we are the same. We don’t attach any meaning to greatness or smallness. What happens to our work afterward is unimportant; we have got all we could out of it while we were doing it.
But pity was inane. Philip felt it was not that which these people needed. They did not pity themselves. They accepted their fate. It was the natural order of things.
In the novels I had read whenever lovely woman stooped to folly she had a baby. The cause was put with infinite precaution, sometimes indeed suggested only by a row of asterisks, but the result was inevitable.
It was all make-believe that he had lived on, and when the truth shattered it he thought reality itself was shattered.
But it’s loving that’s the important thing, not being loved. One’s not even grateful to the people who love one; if one doesn’t love them, they only bore one.
I think I improve on acquaintance.
Who am I to explain the infinite complexities of human nature?