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Quotes by Novelist
"Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy."
399
"What's the book like?""Well, some of it's twaddle, but mostly it's just piffle. Cheers!"
171
"Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness."
131
"I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy."
125
"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."
124
"Finance is a gun. Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger."
114
"The aeroplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth."
104
"There are very honest people who do not think that they have had a bargain unless they have cheated a merchant."
101
"Every gift from a friend is a wish for your happiness."
98
"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
97
"To know ourselves, is agreed by all to be the most useful Learning; the first Lessons, therefore, given us ought to be on that Subject."
95
"What happens is that your wretched memory remembers the words and forgets what's behind them."
94
"Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another."
94
"When thinking about companions gone, we feel ourselves doubly alone."
93
"If the infinity of the sea may call out thus, perhaps when a man is growing old, calls come to him, too, from another infinity still darker and more deeply mysterious; and the more he is wearied by life the dearer are those calls to him."
92
"O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!"
88
"It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut."
86
"Without literature my life would be miserable."
86
"The clever men at Oxford, know all that there is to be knowed. But they none of them know one half as much, as intelligent Mr. Toad."
83
"I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."
82
"Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought."
82
"In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility."
81
"Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more priviledged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex."
81
"We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer's movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious."
81
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