Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.
For a good man fame is always a problem.
I get fed up with all this nonsense of ringing people up and lighting cigarettes and answering the doorbell that passes for action in so many modern plays.
Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are.
Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.
If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the U. S. A. , I would certainly choose the Soviet Union.
Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?
I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.
Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.
Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason.
Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.
Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.
Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor.
When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.
Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.
Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?
There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.
Had Shakespeare listened to the news of Duncans death in a tavern or heard the knocking on his own bedroom door after he had finished the writing of Macbeth?
If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.
I'm tired and I'm sick to death of being without you.
Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.
People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery.
Oh well, perhaps when you're my age you'll know the heart is an untrustworthy beast.The mind too,but it doesn't talk about love.
He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.
A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.
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