It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
It was like having a box of chocolates shut in the bedroom drawer. Until the box was empty it occupied the mind too much.
He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.
However great a man's fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance - so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamor to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.
She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.
An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.
A man kept his character even when he was insane.
A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, andit couldnt concieve what it hasnt experienced
Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven't even got a self to express.
They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.
When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.
Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.
The problem of pretending to be alive.
It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.
I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.
This (Vietnam) was a land of rebellious barons. It was like Europe in the Middle Ages. But what were the Americans doing here? Columbus had not yet discovered their country.
A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.
I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.
A ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system.
You cannot love without intuition.
Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.
And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.
What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?
One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand.
We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.
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