Wait until you're afraid of living ten years alone with no companion and a nursing home at the end of it. Then you'll start running in any direction, even away from that girl in the red dressing-gown, to find someone, any one,who will last until you are through.
One starts promiscuous and ends like one's grandfather, faithful to one woman.
Darkness, when once it fell, fell like a stone.
Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift.
Sometimes we have a kind of love for our enemies and sometimes we feel hate for our friends.
Find me an uncomplicated child, Pyle. When we are young we are a jungle of complications. We simplify as we get older.
She's no child. She's tougher than you'll ever be. Do you know the kind of polish that doesn't take scratches? That's Phuong. She can survive a, dozen of us. She'll get old, that's all. She'll suffer from childbirth and hunger and cold and rheumatism, but she'll never suffer like we do from thoughts, obsessions-she won't scratch, she'll only decay.
Time has its revenges, but revenges seem so often sour.
Moonlight reminds me of a mortuary and the cold wash of an unshaded globe over a marble slab, but starlight is alive and never still, it is almost as though someone in names of the stars are friendly. Venus is any woman we love, the Bears are the bears of childhood, and I suppose the Southern Cross, to those, like my wife, who believe, may be a favourite hymn or a prayer beside the bed.
My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action—even an opinion is a kind of action.
I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent.
Home: it was a phrase one used to mean four walls behind which one slept. There had never been a home.
For peace you needed human company-his aloneness was like a threat of things to come.
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
Evil ran like malaria in his veins.
It didn’t matter so much after all: a little additional pain was hardly noticeable in the huge abandonment.
When a man wakes after a dangerous operation he puts a special value upon the first face he sees as the anaesthetic wears away.
A virtuous man can almost cease to believe in Hell: but he carried Hell about with him.
Pride wavered in his voice like a plant with shallow roots.
Loneliness lay in my bed and I took loneliness into my arms at night.
I would have liked to weep, but the ducts were as dry as the hot-water pipes.
Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God-a being capable of understanding.
I was fond of Dominguez: where other men carry their pride like a skin-disease on the surface, sensitive to the least touch, his pride was deeply hidden and reduced to the smallest proportion possible, I think, for any human being.
Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever.
I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit.
Suffering is not increased by numbers: one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.
Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.