Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His...

I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then...

Tavainimene on tsivilisatsiooni nuhtlus. Aga tema on juba ebatavaliselt tavaline.

You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons:...

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

You have shared your secret. I think you will find it to be an unburdening in many other ways. You have very considerable natural advantages. You have nothing to fear from life. A day will...

In spite of her superficial independence, her fundamental need was to cling.All her life was an attempt to disprove it; and so proved it. She was like a sea anemone — had only to be...

I’m only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist.

If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.

Armastan elada täisverelist elu, armastan kõiki, kes lihtsalt ei istu ja jälgi.

Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?”For fun?”Fun!’ He pounced on the word. ‘Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.

…and his eyes had that splendid innocence, that opaque blue candour of the satanically fallen. ~ The French Lieutenant’s Woman

I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I’ve become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I’m not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It’s...

She’s always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.’ ‘Prose and pudding?”I don’t expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.

There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives; and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.

Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependant upon it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure; and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a...

I am one in a row of specimens. It’s when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I’m meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that...

…there are times when silence is a poem.

She had something that is gone from the world, from the female world. A sweetness without sentimentality, a limpidity without naivety. She was so easy to hurt, to tease. And when she teased, it was...

When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies

You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it…fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away...

I was worse off than even Alison was; she hated life, I hated mysef. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was...

Labor is a man crowning glory.””Not this man’s.””I quote Marx”I raised my hands. The pickaxe handle had been rough.”I quote blisters.

Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need – an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.

She smiled at him as they waited for their dessert, her chin poised on her clasped hands.’You’re being very silent.”That’s how men cry.

If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.

Love is the mistery between two people, not the identity. We were at the opposite poles of humanity. Lily was humanity bound to duty, unable to choose, suffering, at the mercy of social ideals.Humanity both...

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can’t have affected you.

Wolves don’t hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.

We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.

There had always been a conflict in me between mystery and meaning. I had pursued tha latter, worshipped the latter as a doctor. As a socialist and rationalist. But then I saw that the attempt...

That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will.

Now I understand why you grow so many flowers.”She shifted her head, not understanding.I said, “To cover the stink of sulphur.

I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can’t you understand? I don’t think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a...

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the only thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects....

There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always...

Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly...

You’re not me. You can’t feel like I feel.””I can feel.””No you can’t. You just choose not to feel or something and everything’s fine.””It’s not fine. It’s just not so bad.

I suppose I’d had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among...

He stared to sea. “I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I...

It’s despair at the lack of (I’m cheating, I didn’t say all these things – but I’m going to write what I want to say as well as what I did) feeling, of love, of...

and like most people who have spent much of their adult life being emotionally dishonest, I overcalculated the sympathy a final being honest would bring

The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.””I suppose one could say that Hitler didn’t betray his self.””You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray...

He said, one has to learn that painting well – in the academic and technical sense – comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you’ve got that ability. So have thousands.

When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends – using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world – she...

Girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education.

It’s despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It’s despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It’s...

Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice. On the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken myself to be...