There's nothing so heavy as books, sir--unless it's bricks.
There are dreams which belong only partly in the unconscious; these are the dreams we remember on waking so vividly that we deliberately continue them, and so fall asleep again and wake and sleep and the dream goes on without interruption, with a thr...
He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.
He had in those days imagined himself capable of extraordinary heroisms and endurances which would make the girl he loved forget the awkward hands and the spotty chin of adolescence. Everything had seemed possible. One could laugh at daydreams, but s...
In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all ...
Knowledge was the great thing--not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed, passionate, trivial human knowledge.
A police photograph is like a passport photograph: the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the cheap lens. No one can deny the contours of the flesh, the shape of nose and mouth, and yet we protest, This i...
He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.
We forget very easily what gives us pain.
A man kept his character even when he was insane.
It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.
But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love--it's being unhappy...
One can't love humanity. One can only love people.
Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.
It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.
The old man in the beard he felt convinced was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn't it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damna...
