I needed a new mystery.
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 the past seemed ten times closer than it was.
The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
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.
Sometimes to return is a vulgarity.
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 in some way the traitor Iago punished, in ...
Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.
Girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education.
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 wiser.
In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.
...there are times when silence is a poem.
If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.
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 of us...
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 makes war abhorrent to all real women - and abusr...
It is not the state of war that isolates. It is well known, it brings people together. But in the battlefield -- that is something different. Because that is when the real enemy, death, appears. I no longer saw any warmth in numbers. I saw only Thana...
