Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.
Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.
As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.
Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling.
Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.
Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Each meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.
Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.
The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak.
Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.
we are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. but we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. we are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.
What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?
Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.
The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession.
We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
... when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what's duller than that?
I think philosophy is extremely good training for anyone who wants to do anything. Although that is an idea which people may speak scornfully of now, I think it does teach one to
Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing.
Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications.
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.
Eating reveals the characteristic grossness of the human race and also the in-built failure of its satisfactions. We arrive eager, we stuff ourselves and we go away depressed and disappointed and probably feeling a bit queasy into the bargain. It's an image of the déçu in human existence. A greedy start and a stupefied finish. Waiters, who are constantly observing this cycle, must be the most disillusioned of men.
There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good.
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