(no subject)
1. He did not expect to be told what it was, any more than a dog expects to know why the trunks are being got out, or for how long, or if he will be going.
2. Summer cradled him, the lap of a kind nurse whose knitting-needles click in the rhythm of sleep.
3. She looked at every man she met as if there were only one thing she wanted to know about him, but her speech was terrifyingly genteel. Laurie detested her.
4. Jealousy breathed on him, like the first shiver of sickness.
5. I have fallen in love. I now know something about myself which I have been suspecting for years, if I had the honesty to admit it. I ought to be frightened and ashamed, but I am not.
6. He felt that kind of false resignation which can deceive us when we contemplate trouble at a moment of not actually experiencing it.
7. He was filled with a vast sense of the momentous, of unknown mysteries.
8. He felt absolute, filled; he could have died then content, empty-handed and free. All gifts he had ever wished for seemed only traps, now, to dim him and make him less. This, he thought with perfect certainty, this after all is to be young, it is for this. Now we have the strength to make our memories, out of hard stuff, out of steel and crystal.
9. The blackberries tasted of frost and faint sun and smoke and purple leaves: sweet, childish, and sad.
10. The touch of autumn struck from his youth that cosmic sadness, which time will tame like the bite of spring.
11. The lovers of the innocent must protect them above all from the knowledge of their own cruelty.
12. ‘Love.’ Laurie skimmed as lightly as he could over the most treacherous word in the language.
13. Laurie sat waiting: longing wearily, yet dreading, to be released into loneliness by the coming of this little death.
14. They sat side by side, nursing their so different griefs which were yet the same grief to the inmost heart, unaware of the instinctive comfort they got from their sense of solidarity.
15. A false but powerful sense of destiny attends those decisions which seem to be demanded of us without warning, but which we have in reality been maturing within ourselves.
16. Laurie felt an inexplicable urgency to be kind, for which he could find no expression.
17. It was also the trouble, he perceived, with nine-tenths of the people here tonight. They were specialists. They have not merely accepted their limitations, as Laurie was ready to accept his, loyal to his humanity if not to his sex, and bringing an extra humility to the hard study of human experience. They had identified themselves with their limitations; they were making a career of them.
18. What makes me cross about people like Ralph is the way everyone uses them. Their life gets like one of those ham spy films where they brief the agent and say, ‘But remember, one slip and you’re on your own.’
19. T. E. Lawrence has a rather sad passage about ‘complex men who know how sacrifice uplifts the redeemer and casts down the bought.’ He doesn’t use the word ‘complex’ flatteringly, and neither do I.
20. Laurie thought how in peacetime, from here, the town would have lain below them like a starry sky. Now, as the bridge gave gently on its chains in the wind that swept along the gorge, there was only a darkling sense of loneliness and height.
21. It was like having been lost in a surrealist picture, eyes with iron spikes growing out of them, and dead horses in Paris hats. All done very bright and sharp and looking almost solid. Then something real appears, and it all peels off like wet paper.
22. Some things can’t be thought about. The more you try to be honest with them, they more they lie to you. I’m only beginning to know that.
23. Laurie was saying to himself that it would soon cease to seem so important, this discovery he had made that, instead of accepting concealment as a permanent condition of his life, he had merely been enduring it.
24. Because he did for me what you wouldn’t do, I’m alive to be with you now.
25. They tried, in this way and that, to make signals of confidence in each other across the No Man’s Land which both avoided.
26. The out-patient departments of general hospitals do not conduce to a thoughtless optimism.
27. I always find,” said Ralph presently, “that the further I go away, the more patriotic I get.["]
28. In seven years, thought Laurie, every cell in one’s body has been replaced, even our memories live in a new brain. That is not the face I saw, and these are not the eyes I saw with. Even our selves are not the same, but only a consequence of the selves we had then. Yet I was there and I am here[;]
29. Strangers are a distorting mirror, and hold things off.
30. This, he found, was what he wanted. He felt tired and sick and it was wonderful not to be obliged to think, or to be in charge of himself.
31. He could have worked out his salvation, if they had let him alone; all he had ever asked had been to work his passage.
32. One might have called his manner a colorless extract of decision.
33. In the first place, I didn’t choose to be what I am, it was determined when I wasn’t in a position to exercise any choice and without my knowing what was happening.
34. At a time like this one would remember little things that had been harmless and happy and which one had expected always to remember with pleasure, and they would seem to look at one with a sneer.
35. […] and then, as he looked again, there was a sharp stirring of some very old, romantic memory; perhaps of some book illustration he had known as a young boy, of which his very first glimpse of Ralph at school had reminded him before he had even known his name.
36. He didn’t want to take his mind from the story, or disturb with analysis this fragile happiness and security, which were what one might feel if some legend, dear to one’s childhood but long abandoned, were marvellously proved true.
37. Life is cruel, he thought; leaving out war and all that wholesale stuff, human life is essentially cruel.
38. He sat there for a moment, his head beside Ralph’s knees, and this sharp sense of life’s cruelty trembling in him like an arrow that has just struck.
39. One saw him naked in fear, or in need, and though the objects of these feelings were illusion, still it seemed not decent to spy on him.
40. It was as if, thought Laurie, one were idealizing in memory someone already lost.
41. His heart contracted. All other thoughts were swamped by the idea that Charlot had struggled to the surface for a moment, had looked into his face and made this appeal to him alone.
42. He saw the startled grief on Andrew’s face, and, without letting it come clearly into his mind, felt a secret primitive satisfaction; insecurity wants always to make its mark.
43. […] don’t stand there like St Sebastian full of arrows, thinking of nothing but your own bloody principles. When you care about people you can’t always be so choosy.
44. At this moment, he could feel nothing in himself from which Andrew ought to be protected. With a simplicity which this knowledge made to seem quite natural, he leaned over and kissed him. Even when he had done it he felt no reaction or self-reproach. It was as if it had happened before and they both remembered.
45. Women still stood to him for background and stability, as they do to children, because they had never stood for anything more.
46. Stop being so nice to me,” she whispered. “Please stop, it only makes it worse.”
47. They were both young enough to be capable of solemn abstract discussion about love; and in this way, with its pleasantly painful stirring of the emotions, they made their way back to the turning where hospital people who had been walking out used to part discreetly.
48. They only talked for a couple of minutes, idle stuff to be overheard. But when Laurie came out again, he felt rather less like a citizen of nowhere.
49. It had all been, he thought, like the kind of deathbed one hopes not to have; going on too long, one’s nearest and dearest doing the right thing with dreadful conscientiousness and stifling guiltily their prayers for the end.
50. You couldn’t be vague on your facts. He was a bright, sharp boy, and seemed to have lived with people who regarded lying to children as the natural means of keeping them quiet.
51. The voice was kind; but there was more than kindness in it. It struck the sounding-board of Laurie’s loneliness and his will died.
52. No one’s a hundred per cent consistent all the time. We might like to be. We can plan our lives along certain lines. But you know, there’s no future in screwing down all the pressure valves and smashing in the gauge. You can do it for a bit and then something goes.
53. I’m not worth your taking trouble over. Whatever happened, I never could be worth it.
54. She was always over-thanked and underloved, having something unco’ guid about her which led her always to do more than people wanted done.
55. But actually, we found persecuting Christians awfully overrated. Perhaps we needed lions or something. Perhaps we ought to have tried burning them alive. Perhaps we just needed to be civilians and not soldiers.
56. He didn’t know why memories which had lain with his mind’s lumber for so many years, waking no more than a dim nostalgia, should return now to charge the present with so unbearable a weight of longing.
57. He had been in great pain but hadn’t wanted to tell her; he had lain watching the clock when she wasn’t looking, and praying silently, “Go away. Please go away.
58. For the last hour he had tried to think of nothing, and in the end had almost succeeded. But nature abhors a vacuum, and it was impossible to empty the mind completely.
59. Someone was here now for whom he came first: it was like a well in the desert.
60. He had reviewed his own weaknesses early in life, and with untender determination trained them as one bends a tree; the resolution this had demanded had stamped his face with most of the lineaments of strength.
61. He’d have liked to be the one who brought him here, to put me in my place. Too bad he belongs to me.
62. It was growing col, but he was warm enough; and it seemed that if he didn’t move, time would stop also and nothing else need ever exist but this. But sleep ebbed away from him, as little to be commanded as the tide, and he felt how the bright fire, burning so long in a closed room, had drunk up all the air.
63. Ralph lay quiet with the image he had created, the beloved and desired, for whom nothing was good enough, of whom nothing was demanded but to trust and receive.
64. It can be good to be given what you want; it can be better, in the end, never to have it proved to you that this was what you wanted.
65. At some stage of a broken midnight conversation, he had said, “I’ve often had a feeling that there’s nowhere I really belong.” He had hardly known himself what he wanted; but Ralph had said, without a moment’s hesitation, “You belong with me. As long as we’re both alive, this will always be your place before anyone else’s. That’s a promise.
66. I wanted someone to follow, I wanted him to be brave. But he wants to be brave for me too; and no one can do that.
67. Laurie thought again that he was built like the hero of a boy’s adventure story: strong-looking, but not with the set look of a man’s strength; the hollows over the collar-bones and in the pit of the throat had still the softened edges of youth.
68. The desire to be needed was basic to his make-up; it had developed in him a high degree of accomplishment and tact.
69. Ralph scratched up softly the short hair at the nape of his neck, causing an involuntary shiver like a stroked cat’s.
70. You say this boy has guts, but what you’re trying to do for him is to keep him like a mid-Victorian virgin in a world of illusion where he doesn’t know he’s alive. He mustn’t be told he’s a passenger when human decency’s fighting for survival, in case it upsets his religion. He mustn’t be told he’s a queer, in case he has to do a bit of hard thinking and make up his mind. He mustn’t know you’re in love with him, in case he feels he can’t go on having his cake and eating it. If he amounts to anything, he won’t really want to be let off being human.
71. The pagans did recognize our existence, at least. They even allowed us a few standards and a bit of human dignity, just like real people.
72. […] you said it isn’t what you are, it’s what you do with it.
73. We sign the warrant for our own exile, he thought. Self-pity and alibis come after.
74. The telephone is rather diminishing, isn’t it? In a way Morse would be better, because it doesn’t pretend to be a conversation.
75. One can see sometimes in a crowded railway carriage at night two lovers, lethargic, travel-grimed, and bored, weary beyond the dimmest stirrings of desire, but by instinct comfortably adapting their bodies to cushion and support each other, making a little refuge from the crush while the strangers or even friends around them rub elbows and knees, stiff with apologetic constraint and inward resentment.
76. A queer party; something between a lonely hearts club and an amateur brothel.
77. I’ve listened to so many life-histories; I don’t know why, I always seem to pitch up when they’ve had a drink too many, or a knock too many, or something. It’s loneliness that rots them, every time. A starving man won’t notice a dirty plate.
78. You can’t eat and breathe for me, or live for me. No one can.”
“It kills me to just stand watching,” Ralph said. “It’s not the way I’m made.
79. The fire, settling, threw up a dim transparent flame; there was a faint resurgence of light on the fair hair beside him. It was a Delphic answer, he thought, to an impossible petition; you could see the smile behind the smoke.
80. The idealist and romantic in Ralph, reviving late and left for dead, felt its own wants with the greater urgency; and it had lived too hard, too close to the ground, to be deceived.
81. With you it was more, sometimes, you must have noticed I was difficult; but I got over that and it came to see more like a smile when one is happy. It is the happiness one thinks about and not the smile.
82. What he had said about me was true. He wanted to see what I would do, I suppose, and I did what he expected. But it taught me something. The thing you want to kill is really in yourself. That is why people become cruel in war, because they are doing what I did.
83. If you touched the railings your hand came away thick with grime. It was the kind of place where there should have been children playing in the street, but they were mostly gone.
84. "Do you ever think,” said Dave, “that retribution seems to spread itself very unevenly? It’s often seemed so to me. But I think one must take the analogy of the body. A gangrened limb is quite insensitive. Only the living tissues feel pain."
85. […] Laurie realized that his impersonality was in the nature of a human flinching, and that he was willing Laurie not to speak.
86. Just lately I have been happier than I ever had the right to expect, and as one goes round the world one sees that happiness is hard to come by and seldom lasts for long.
87. Knowledge was cruelty. The moment he had used it, he threw away the discovery he had made, that he had waited at the door of a house without defenses.
88. Remorse, even the greatest, has the nature of a debt; if we could only clear the books, we feel that we should be free. But a deep compassion has the nature of love, which keeps no balance sheet; we are no longer our own.