In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.
Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.
It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.
You cannot control what you love--you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead.
Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?
If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.
I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.
They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.
One never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one can not remember what toothpaste they use; what are their views on interior decoration, and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed.
All the emotions have something in common. People are quite aware of the sorrow there always is in lust, but they are not so aware of the lust there is in sorrow.
The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief.
They are always saying God loves us. If thats love Id rather have a bit of kindness.
All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.
We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.
Lust is not the worst thing. It is because any day, any time, lust may turn into love that we have to avoid it. And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.
God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.
Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?
How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.
Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.
But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know--from experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and . . .
I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.
He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.
I write about situations that are common, universal might be more correct, in which my characters are involved and from which only faith can redeem them, though often the actual manner of the redemption is not immediately clear. They sin, but there is no limit to God's mercy and because this is important, there is a difference between not confessing in fact, and the complacent and the pious may not realize it.
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