It’s no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You’ve got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you...

And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place,...

Aren’t I enough for you?’ she asked.’No,’ he said. ‘You are enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I wanted a man friend, as eternal...

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional...

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste than Herman Melville.

It was like something lurking in the darkness within him…There is remained in the darkness, the great pain, tearing him at times, and then being silent.

I WANT her though, to take the same from me.She touches me as if I were herself, her own.She has not realized yet, that fearful thing, thatI am the other,she thinks we are all of...

Life is ours to be spent, not tobe saved.

You can’t insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.

They stood together in a false intimacy, a nervous contact. And he was in love with her.

I am turned into a dream. I feel nothing, or I don’t know what I feel. Yet it seems to me I am happy.

Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity...

She lost her illusions in the collapse of her sympathies.

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,and when we escape like squirrels turning in thecages of our personalityand get into the forests again,we shall shiver with cold and frightbut things will...

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I’m sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual...

But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don’t have them they hate you because you won’t; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason....

The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one’s history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.

Connie felt again the tightness, niggardliness of the men of her generation. They were so tight, so scared of life!

Gods should be iridescent, like the rainbow in the storm. Man creates a God in his own image, and the gods grow old along with the men that made them… But the god-stuff roars eternally,...

Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

It is a fine thing to establish one’s own religion in one’s heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.

Of course , if I am nothing but an ego, and woman is nothing but another ego, then there is really no vital difference between us. Two little dolls of conscious entities, squeaking when you...

And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse...

We are so overwhelmed with quantities of books, that we hardly realize any more that a book can be valuable, valuable like a jewel, or a lovely picture, into which you can look deeper and...

On revient toujours a son premier amour.” It sounds like a cynicism to-day. As if we really meant: “On ne revient jamais a son premier amour.” But as a matter of fact, a man never...

It was the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned exchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment.

For God’s sake, let us be mennot monkeys minding machinesor sitting with our tails curledwhile the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.

He felt if he could not be alone, and if he could not be left alone, he would die.

The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being.

And she shrank away again, back into her darkness, and for a long while remained blotted safely away from living.

We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

One sheds ones sickness in books- repeats and presents again ones emotions, to be master of them.

Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant,...

She, who was bored almost to agony, and who had nothing at all to do, she had not time to think even, seriously, of anything. Time being, after all, only the current of the soul...

Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty in Europe. In Europe Liberty was a great life-throb. But in America Democracy was always something anti-life. The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had always a...

When along the pavement,Palpitating flames of life,People flicker around me,I forget my bereavement,The gap in the great constellation,The place where a star used to be

Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.

If we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us out of the imminent night

We fucked a flame into being

For {she} had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily belonging to one another.

When one is grown up, money is lying about at one’s service. It is only when one is young that it is rare. Take no thought for money – that always lies to hand.(Women in...

She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.

This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods,...

He toasted his bacon on a fork and caught the drops of fat on his bread; then he put the rasher on his thick slice of bread, and cut off chunks with a clasp-knife, poured...

All the great words, it seemed to Connie were cancelled, for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now and dying from day to day.

Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.