Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful. And more truly for what I have not received.
Hope is a talent like any other.
Language is memory and metaphor.
invaders always destroy libraries.
Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.
A joke is a joke or the image of a truth.
Surprise will be my last emotion, not fear.
She did not so much cook as assassinate food.
My mind is not suited to go much into company.
Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions.
In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.
Failures to love are irremediable and irredeemable.
All pornography is to a degree sadistic - inevitably.
Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human.
A minor symptom of wars is the cancerous growth of committees.
You can't argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless.
If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises.
When you talk of revolution ... you never talk of the day after.
Great advertising is the expression of deep emotional sincerity.
There is only one world the world pressing against you this minute.
There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification.
... the stomach is near the heart and one appetite pricks on another.
If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it.
Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present.
Speaking the truth, once you have started it, is too exhilarating to draw back.
The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment words are laid to it.
Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit.
No one asks public men to be strictly moral, but they must seem to be well-behaved.
the sex even in serious pornography has less singularity than the mating of squirrels.
The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle.
There is a stage in any misery when the victim begins to find a deep satisfaction in it.
The critic's hankering to be law-giver rather than servant of literature is irrepressible.
Any marriage worth the name is no better than a series of beginnings - many of them abortive.
I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible.
Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.
Is it really beyond our wits to devise some form of censorship which would trap only the crudely sadistic?
A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.
Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.
The young are so much more vulnerable than the old - the stuff is still warm and malleable, it takes impressions.
jealousy, the most hideous emotion any human being ever suffers, has nothing to do with the mind. Or not at first.
In my firm, we dealt in lies. Advertising is that ... the skilful use of the truth to mislead, to spoil, to debase.
Women will always put persons above ideas ... and so they'll always be defeated. Persons die, and ideas rule the world.
Lord, if there is a heartache Vienna cannot cure I hope never to feel it. I came home cured of everything except Vienna.
Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses.
... the truth is exactly that which can't be got into words. We are forced to lie, a little or, if we are inferior, much.
The gesture with which one generation guards the next is the movement, and the only time we see it clearly, of life itself.
Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.
The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.
The only way to live is to accept each minute as an unrepeatable miracle, which is exactly what it is: a miracle and unrepeatable.
Very rare, the intelligence of the heart. The intelligence of the whimsical brain is less rare, less attaching, sometimes tedious.
