Quote collection
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"From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books."
"Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows."
"It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand."
"I have no wish to take life, not even human life"
"It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another."
"Antisemitism, for instance, is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person."
"One always abandons something in retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army."
"His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he could not altogether escape form her image."
"The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity."
"It is difficult for a statesman who still has a political future to reveal everything that he knows: and in a profession in which one is a baby at 50 and middle-aged at seventy-five, it is natural that anyone who has not actually been disgraced should feel that he still has a future."
"[T]he outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality.:; Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?"
"Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse--hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life."
"If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens."
"Happiness can only exist in acceptance."
"What is not hereditary cannot be permanent."
"Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated."
"What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person."
"Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it."
"Four legs gooood, two legs baaad!"
"Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart in you?"