I think being a woman is like being Irish… Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the time.

—,Me querrás siempre?—No tengo ni la menor idea.—Pues yo a ti te querré siempre.—Eso está bien. ,Podremos meternos por ahí?—No, no creo… Tú eres Apolo y yo soy Marsyas. Acabarás dejándome.—Eso de Apolo y Marsyas...

I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you cannot help. Have faith in God and remember that He will is His...

God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.

I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.

El sexo es un invento absurdo que a pesar de serlo no aspira más que hincharse y penetrar. Se supone que tiene algo que ver con el amor, por lo menos ésa es su leyenda,...

Dora was stunned by this information. She stopped. ‘Do you mean’ she said, ‘that they’re completely imprisoned in there?’Mrs. Marks laughed. ‘Not imprisoned, my dear,’ she said. ‘They are there of their own free will....

The death of God has set the angels free. And they are terrible. There are principalities and powers. Angels are the thoughts of God. Now he had been dissolved into his thoughts which are beyond...

I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.

Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.

Every persisting marriage is based on fear’, said Peregrine. ‘Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what’s at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the...

Love doesn’t think like that. All right, it’s blind as a bat–”Bats have radar. Yours doesn’t seem to be working.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

I hate solitude, but I’m afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need...

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

However, on one occasion, several years ago, I was idiot enough to take a dose of LSD. (I did it to please a woman.) I had what is known as a ‘bad trip’. It was...

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.

But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You’re like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer.

details”? When you start really imagining something you have to forget the details anyhow, they just get in the way. Art isn’t the reproduction of oddments out of life.’‘I never said it was!’ said Arnold....

Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.

One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness.

I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good comes of this.

The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak. You dedicate yourself passionately to something, to a project, to people, to a family, you think of nothing else for weeks and...

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the...

If I spoke now there was always the danger of my telling the truth; when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what’s duller than that?

Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.

Death is not the consummation of oneself but just the end of oneself. Before the self vanishes nothing really is, and that is how it is most of the time. But as soon as the...

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins...

Yes, of course, there’s something fishy about describing people’s feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It’s really...

Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the...

If even a dog’s tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with power, that is the simple sense of the ontological proof. And if there is art enough a...

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes.

Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.

All the time when I speak to you, even now, I’m saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That’s so even between us – and how much...

Education doesn’t make you happy. And what is freedom? We don’t become happy just because we are free, if we are. Or because we have been educated, if we have. But because education may be...

We are clay and nothing is real for us except the uncanny womb of Being into which we shall return.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

Never seen the sea! How could anyone not have seen the sea? Surely the sea must somehow belong to the happiness of every child.

Amo amas amat amamus amatis amant amavi amavisti amavit amavimus amavistis amaverunt amavero amaveris amaverit… Everything was love. Everything will be love. Everything has been love. Everything would be love. Everything would have been love....

There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.

We can only learn to love by loving.

It was a piece of thoroughly picturesque and proper violence. I like a violent man, really, a man who’s a bit of a brute in a decent straightforward way.

The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as...

What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later...

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges...

As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.