To see things as they really were – what an empoverishment!
The conversation of the gods! – I didn’t resent or feel aggrieved because I couldn’t understand it. I was the smallest of the planets, and if I carried messages between them and I couldn’t always understand, that was in order too: they were something in a foreign language – star-talk.
I had never met a lord before, nor had I ever expected to meet one. It didn’t matter what he looked like: he was a lord first, and a human being, with a face and limbs and body, long, long after.
I should not have cared to see it as an act of self-sacrifice even if it had been one; for there is nothing clever in self-sacrifice, nothing to pride oneself on.
It’s better to write about things you feel than about things you know about.
You insisted on thinking of them as angels, even if they were fallen angels.
My dream had become my reality: my old life was a discarded husk.
Readers tend to devour short stories on a newssheet, but would be disinclined to read them in collections.
Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.
Grown-ups didn’t seem to realize that for me, as for most other schoolboys, it was easier to keep silent than to speak. I was a natural oyster.
To my mind’s eye, my buried memories of Brandham Hall are like effects of chiaroscuro, patches of light and dark: it is only with effort that I see them in terms of colour. There are things I know, though I don’t know how I know them, and things that I remember. Certain things are established in my mind as facts, but no picture attaches to them; on the other hand there are pictures unverified by any fact which recur obsessively, like the landscape of a dream.
He was surrounded by tyrants who thought they had a right to order him about: it was a conspiracy. He could not call his soul his own.
I was no longer satisfied with the small change of experience, which had hitherto contented me. I wanted to deal in larger sums.
And everyone assured him that he would never be a man until he learned how to drive. Indeed, the future was already dull and menacing with the ambitions other people entertained on his behalf.
The future was to be a laborious business.
What did we talk about that has left me with an impression of wings and flashes, as of air displaced by the flight of a bird? Of swooping and soaring, of a faint iridescence subdued to the enfolding brightness of the day?
Shut the windows, draw the curtains, keep the rumour out!
The civilian world was a dull place, a tired three-piece orchestra, waiting for the word ‘fun’.
To bleed from many wounds may be more serious than to bleed from one, but the pain, being less localized, is also easier for the mind to bear.
No little boy likes to be called a little man, but any little boy likes to be treated as a little man, and this is what Marian had done for me: at times, and when she had wanted to, she had endowed me with the importance of a grown-up; she had made me feel that she depended on me. She, more than anyone, had puffed me up.