I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.

Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

When there was a choice between love of a woman and hate of a man, her mind could cherish only one emotion, for her love might be a subject for laughter, but no one ever...

Innocence is a kind of insanity

She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn’t be spoken aloud when you are happy.

Beauty is like success: we can’t love it for long.

It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.

I tossed up whether I’d see [the critic] or not: I knew too well the pompous phrases of his article, the buried significance he would discover of which I was unaware and the faults I...

I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.

He had opened the book at random several times, seeking a sortes Virgilianae, before he chose the sentences on which his code was to be based. ‘You say: I am not free. But I have...

I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the cramped and stinking huts to...

He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.

It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving...

Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God.

There is an old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double.

There was a tacit understanding between them that ‘liquor helped’; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism:...

Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.

A police photograph is like a passport photograph: the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the cheap lens. No one can deny the contours of the flesh,...

Intimacy with one person could do this-empty the world of friendships, give a distaste for women’s kisses and their bright chatter, make the ordinary world a little unreal and very uninteresting.

You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.

In five hundred years’ time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor...

Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.

Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can’t love and do nothing.

It is the storyteller’s task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.

She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.

They haven’t left us much to believe in, have they?–even disbelief. I can’t believe in anything bigger than a home or vaguer than a human being.

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no...

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil — or else an absolute ignorance.

I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.

He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.

Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?

If I stopped loving Him, I would cease to believe in His love. If I loved God, then I would believe in His love for me. It’s not enough to need it. We have to...

Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.

the sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits – love was an...

Whew,’ he said, ‘I’m glad that’s over, Thomas. I’ve been feeling awfully bad about it.’ It was only too evident that he no longer did.

If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are...

Knowledge was the great thing–not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed, passionate, trivial human...

For a moment he came near to sharing their incredible belief—it would do no harm to mutter a prayer of thanks to the God of his childhood, the God of the Common and the castle,...

Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly and to the point people always seem to speak on the stage or on the screen, while in real life...

My second wife left me because she said I was too ambitious. She didn’t realize that it is only the dying who are free from ambition. And they probably have the ambition to live. Some...

She couldn’t avoid being serious about things she cared for, and happiness made her grave at the thought of all the things which might destroy it.

Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.

A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, andit couldnt concieve what it hasnt experienced

No wine can be regarded as unimportant, my friend, since the marriage at Cana.

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.