A friend called the other day. 'How are you?' she said. The sun was shining, the sky a merciless blue. It was only eleven in the morning but I had been awake since three twenty. I was in bed because, as usual, I could think of nowhere else to go. I s...
One can say that Javert is our conscience. The ever lurking presence of the law and our own condemnation. The tension between who we were and who we are and who we can be. Javert represents that inescapable, shameful past that forever haunts and pers...
I do not dance,' said Jean-Claude, who had forsworn that exercise for much the same reasons as Miss Stevenson. But here he spoke too soon, for Lady Dorothy Bingham, merciless to what she called 'ballroom skulkers', saw him standing about, ordered Joh...
Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which...
The 'average sensual man' who is sometimes unfaithful to his wife, sometimes tipsy, always a little selfish, now and then (within the law) a trifle sharp in his deals, is certainly, by ordinary standards, a 'lower' type than the man whose soul is fil...
Cassius: On this day, we reach back to hallowed antiquity, to bring you a recreation of the second fall of the mighty Carthage!... On the barren plain of Zama, there stood the invincible armies of the barbarian Hannibal. Ferocious mercenaires and war...
Looking at the rain through my window, I can’t find an answer to this merciless solitude— The same solitude that sprouts from my eyes, A bittersweet tear which haunts me like a shadow. During evenings like this my life is about sad memories. At t...
I don't like feeling sorry for myself. That's not who I am. And most of the time I don't feel that way. Instead, I am grateful for having at least found you. We could have flashed by one another like two pieces of cosmic dust. God or the universe or ...
The thing is, work has simply swamped my whole existence. Slowly but surely it's robbed me of my mother, my wife, and everything that meant anything to me. It's like a germ planted in the skull that devours the brain, spreads to the trunk and the lim...
Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail’s bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had ...
Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist-a master-and ...
Zero: [Reading a letter from M. Gustave] "My dear and trusted colleagues..." M. Gustave: I miss you deeply as I write from the confines of my regrettable and preposterous incarceration. Until I walk amongst you again as a free man, the Grand Budapest...
Captain Dudley Smith: [Captain Smith briefs the squad room on Jack Vincennes' death; Exley is standing beside him] Sergeant Vincennes was killed by a .32 slug to the heart. Time of death, approximately 1 a.m. Although he was found in Echo Park, preli...
