Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.

I left a pause. ‘You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient.’ ‘I should not like to be in the hands of a surgeon who...

Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that...

Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. I did not pray for her,...

A total stranger, and one not of one’s sex, is often the least prejudiced judge.

In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.

Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered;...

Sometimes to return is a vulgarity.

I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our...

Sıradan insan uygarlığın lanetidir.

People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it’s no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and...

Art’s cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.

I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.

The world began in hazard and will end in it.

I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time...

And I envy you. You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you.

I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.

Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things. But what dies is the form. The matter is immortal.

Stop thinking about class, she’d say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.

Because they died, we know we still live. Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.

Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty?...

Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind.

An answer is always a form of death.

The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.

It’s like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it’s silly. A toy I’ve played with too often. It’s a little sad, like an old golliwog...

I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.

There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.

A word (…) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever (…) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer.

The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it’s no go if your personality isn’t worth translating.

Perhaps twenty minutes later he realized she had gone to sleep. He quietly removed his now stiff arm, then turned away. It must have woken her a little After a moment he felt her turn...

I am Emma Woodhouse. I feel for her, of her and in her. I have a different sort of snobbism, but I understand her snobbism. Her priggishness. I admire it. I know she does wrong...

The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.

He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.

The dead live.” “How do they live?” “By love.

I don’t believe in God. And I certainly don’t feel chosen.””I think you may be.”I smiled dubiously. “Thank you.””It is not meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself.

The power of women! I’ve never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.

He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.

They pay thousands and thousands for the Van Goghs and Modiglianis they’d have spat on at the time they were painted. Guffawed at. Made coarse jokes about.

I needed a new mystery.

Some people would say- you’re only a drop, your word-breaking is only a drop, it wouldn’t matter. But all the evil in the world’s made up of little drops. It’s silly talking about the unimportance...

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.