She wasn’t religious. She didn’t believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, Ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers

He opened the book at random, or so he believed, but a book is like a sandy path which keeps the indent of footsteps.

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

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

Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:...

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.

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...

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

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?

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