It’s living – a broad spectrum of living – that teaches you how to live, not philosophy. Philosophy teaches you how to think.
I really do literally put myself into a character’s shoes.
She was happiest when sitting about and reading. She had read thousands of books, seeing no point in doing anything else unless you had to.
Don’t hate anyone,” she had said. “It’s quite useless and harms the hater while it does nothing at all to the hated.
Like all true eccentrics, he thought other people very odd.
Literacy is in our veins like blood. It enters every other phrase. It is next to impossible to hold a real conversation, as against an interchange of instructions and acquiescences, in which reference to the printed word is not made or in which the implications of something read do not occur.
She didn’t really know London, only lived in it.
People are different in reality from the way you’ve seen them while making scenarios in your mind. For one thing, they’re less consistent. They surprise you all the time.
People were, as he had long suspected, uniformly vile and rotten, vastly inferior to things. Objects never let you down.
The sensations he had were shared by many of the young, poor and beautiful: how unfair it was that they should be denied benefits which the old and ugly enjoyed.
I kill, therefore I am.
They remained the same and could be an endless source of pleasure and satisfaction. There might be people, or a person, of whom that was also true, but he had never, by the age of eighteen, come across any of them.
They spoke from a distant past when everyone read books and most people had hobbies, made things, played cards and chess, dressed up and played charades, sewed and painted and wrote letters and sent postcards.
The admonitions of those who seldom remonstrate are more effective than the commands of naggers.
I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot...
Burden thought irrelevantly that Wendy Williams must be attracted by bald men, first Rodney with his exaggerated forehead, naked as an apple, then this pebble-head.
He would have to get used to it, she thought. He would have to get used to her being more and more preoccupied with books.
He turned on to the track and wondered why no birds were singing. The only sound he could hear was the buzz and rattle of a drill, which he assumed to be the farmer doing something to a fence. It was, in fact, a woodpecker whose presence would have thrilled him had he known what it was.
His school had been so committed to establishing equality that the staff told a pupil he or she had done well only if they could tell every other member of the class the same thing.
Greed and envy took from a man’s heart everything but – well, greed and envy.
The trouble with psychology,” said Wexford epigrammatically, ’is that it doesn’t take human nature into account.