He’d never had much to do with the police in the Nottinghamshire village where he lived. They existed at a distance, as it were, and Joshua’s life hadn’t led him closer than that. By accident his actions had been law-abiding.
It’s a treat being a runner, out in the world by yourself with not a soul to make you bad-tempered or tell you what to do.
The art of writing is to explain the complications of the human soul with the simplicity that can be universally understood.
Everybody thinks theyll never get married at your age. You think you can go on all your life being single, but you suddenly find out that you cant.
Well, it’s a good life and a good world, all said and done, if you don’t weaken.
I’m me and nobody else; and whatever people think I am or say I am, that’s what I’m not, because they don’t know a bloody thing about me.
You should think about nobody and go your own way, not on a course marked out for you by people holding mugs of water and bottles of iodine in case you fall and cut yourself so that they can pick you up – even if you want to stay where you are – and get you moving again.
Whatever people think I am or say I am, that’s what I am not.
If you went through life refusing all the bait dangled in front of you, that would be no life at all. No changes would be made and you would have nothing to fight against. Life would be dull as ditchwater.
You can always rely on a society of equals taking it out on the women.
Government wars aren’t my wars; they’ve got nowt to do with me, because my own war’s all that I’ll ever be bothered about.
I realized it might be possible to do such a thing, run for money, trot for wages on piece work at a bob a puff rising bit by bit to a guinea a gasp and retiring through old age at thirty-two because of lace-curtain lungs, a football heart, and legs like varicose beanstalks.
All I’m out for is a good time – all the rest is propaganda.
I’m a human being and I’ve got thoughts and secrets and bloody life inside me that he doesn’t know is there, and he’ll never know what’s there because he’s stupid. I suppose you’ll laugh at this, me saying the governor’s a stupid bastard when I know hardly how to write and he can read and write and add-up like a professor. But what I say is true right enough. He’s stupid, and I’m not, because I can see further into the likes of him than he can see into the likes of me.
Hope to the very end, he told himself, even when you’ve slipped into the fires of Hell and the flames are searing your guts.
The rowdy gang of singers who sat at the scattered tables saw Arthur walk unsteadily to the head of the stairs, and though they must have all known that he was dead drunk, and seen the danger he would soon be in, no one attempted to talk to him and lead him back to his seat. With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins playing hide-and-seek inside his stomach, he fell from the top-most stair to the bottom.
We know you weren’t in the house’, he said, starting up again, cranking himself with the handle. They always say ‘We’, ‘We’, never ‘I’ ‘I’ – as if they feel braver and righter knowing there’s a lot of them against only one.
I wonder if I’m the only one in the running business with this system of forgetting that I’m running because I’m too busy thinking.
Everything’s dead, but good, because it’s dead before coming alive, not dead after being alive. That’s how I look at it.
Because when on a raw and frosty morning I get up at five o’clock and stand shivering my belly off on the stone floor and all the rest still have another hour to snooze before the bells go, I slink downstairs through all the corridors to the big outside door with a permit running-card in my fist, I feel like the first and last man in the world, both at once, if you can believe what I’m trying to say.
Sometimes I think that I’ve never been so free as during that couple of hours when I’m trotting up the path out of the gates and turning by that bare-faced, big-bellied oak tree at the lane end. Everything’s dead, but good, because it’s dead before coming alive, not dead after being alive.