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...

Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.

Oh,clever… what’s the use of that? Are they human beings?

But she finally had the good sense to see that a long, dull and predictable future was an expensive price to pay for the satisfaction of a passing sexual attraction.

The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed–thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes–because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself–and all for a few hundred yards...

Ma olen üks eksemplar liblikate seas. Talle ei meeldi ainult see, kui ma hakkan tiibu siputades reast välja kippuma. Mulle on määratud olla surnud, nööp-nõelaga kinnitatud, alati kaunis. Ta teab küll, et elusolek on osa...

It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.

I want to tell you what’s really happened.””Not now. Please not now. Whatever’s happened, come and make love to me.”And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been so much...

The height the dupe has fallen is measured by his anger.

He said, it’s rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven’t any choice. But it’s what you say that counts. It’s what distinguishes all great art...

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.