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.
I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.
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've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.
So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days.
A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.
Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood - for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.
You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?.
A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.
With Your great schemes, You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.
Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.
I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.
My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust forever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.
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