Quotations

The tears were really coming now, and one fat stripe rolled along the barrel of the gun and down the loop around the trigger to burst flat against my index finger.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

… how mean and foolish are the living, with their never-ending terrors and curiosities, the puny effort of their lives, when faced with the quiet kingly dead.

It is terrible to desire and not
possess, and terrible to possess
and not desire.

Just as I dress and go out to visit the professor and exchange a few more or less insincere compliments with him, without really wanting to at all, so it is with the majority of men day by day and hour by hour in their daily lives and affairs.

Ah, look where I might and think what I might, there was no cause for rejoicing and nothing beckoned me. There was nothing to charm me or tempt me. Everything was old, withered, grey, limp and spent, and stank of staleness and decay.

I always say that if you wanted to think the worst of a man, better not see him close to, because when you watch him getting stuck a little deeper you think it’s all just hopeless and in the end there’s no difference between drinking a cup of café

Jacques was talking, Mathieu looked at him, it was all so tedious, the bureau in the half-light, the snatches of band-music from beyond the pines, the curls of butter in the little dish, the empty bowls on the tray: so futile an eternity.

Evidently this new career wasn’t all thrills. There were spills, too, for some, maybe for me. Already I’d noted a few slippery patches. Little jobs had no such peaks and troughs, what you saw was what you got.

I asked her if she was unhappy; she says it is not a question of happiness.