225 quotes found
"A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others."
"India has been very lucky in the Nehru family. Nehru was unique in recent world history: a colonial protest figure, a folk hero who did not appeal to fanaticism but was a reasonable, reasoning man. A man committed to science, religious tolerance, the rule of law and the rights of man. Indira Gandhi, his daughter, carried on this way of looking at things. In Britain, she might have had the reputation of being domineering, harsh, even ruthless. And you can easily make a case for her being authoritarian, antidemocratic, stamping out protest. But it isn't enough just to do that. One must consider what was on the other side. In 1975, some opposition parties wanted India to go back to some pre-industrial time of village life. Piety can take odd forms."
"Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two."
"One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas — and you have to work through it all."
"One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria."
"To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up."
"What is happening in India is a mighty creative process.... But every other Indian knows precisely what is happening. Deep down he knows that a larger response is emerging to their historical humiliation. … It is not enough to abuse these youths or use that fashionable word from Europe, 'fascism'… There is a big, historical development going on in India. Wise men should understand it and ensure that it does not remain in the hands of fanatics."
"What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And — though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall — what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing."
"I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange that a man who has dealt in words and emotions and ideas for nearly fifty years shouldn't have a few to spare, so to speak. But everything of value about me is in my books. Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will — with luck — come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise. That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing."
"It [Islam] has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'... This abolition of the self demanded by Muslims was worse than the similar colonial abolition of identity. It is much, much worse in fact... You cannot just say you came out of nothing."
"We knew nothing but despotism. That is why the very rich Mughal empire could break up into nothing. Turn to dust at the merest touch of a foreign power. There was no institution, there was no creative nation, no university, no printing press, there was nothing but personal power. … How do you ignore history? But the nationalist movement, independence movement ignored it. You read the Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru, it talks about the mythical past and then it jumps the difficult period of the invasions and conquests. So you have Chinese pilgrims coming to Bihar, Nalanda and places like that. Then somehow they don't tell you what happens, why these places are in ruin. They never tell you why Elephanta island is in ruins or why Bhubaneswar was desecrated. So history has to be studied, it is very painful history. But it is not more painful than most countries have had. … It isn't India alone that has had a rough time, that has to be understood. But the rough time has to be faced and it cannot be glossed over. There are tools for us to understand the rough time. We can read a man like Ibn Battuta who will tell you what it was like to be there in the midst of the fourteenth century, terrible times. An apologist of the invaders would like to gloss that over. But it would be wrong to gloss that over, that has to be understood. … But I would like to see this past recovered and not dodged."
"If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead."
"I have to stress that I was traveling in the non-Arab Muslim world. Islam began as an Arab religion; it spread as an Arab empire. In Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia—the countries of my itinerary—I was traveling, therefore, among people who had been converted to what was an alien faith. I was traveling among people who had to make a double adjustment—an adjustment to the European empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and an earlier adjustment to the Arab faith. You might almost say that I was among people who had been doubly colonized, doubly removed from themselves."
"It turns out now that the Arabs were the most successful imperialists of all time; since to be conquered by them (and then to be like them) is still, in the minds of the faithful, to be saved."
"At the height of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, V.S. Naipaul saw it as ‘a new, historical awakening’, of ‘Indians becoming alive to their history’ and ‘beginning to understand that there has been a great vandalising of India. Because of the nature of the conquest and the nature of Hindu society such understanding had eluded Indians before’."
"It is like reading of a land periodically devastated by hordes of lemmings or locusts; it is like turning from the history of a coral reef, in which every act and every death is a foundation, to the depressing chronicle of a succession of castles built on the waste sand of the sea-shore. This is Woodruff on the difference between European history and Indian history. He has chosen his images well. But the sandcastle is not quite exact. The sandcastle is flattened by the tide and leaves not trace, and India is above all the land of ruins."
"The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves."
"India is for me a difficult country. It isn’t my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far."
"While the Ottomans moved into South-East Europe, the Moghul invasion of India destroyed much of Hindu and Buddhist civilization there. The recent destruction by Moslems in Afghanistan of colossal Buddhist statues is a reminder of what happened to temples and shrines, on an enormous scale, when Islam took over."
"The key Hindu concept of dharma — the right way, the sanctioned way, which all men must follow, according to their natures — is an elastic concept. At its noblest it combines self-fulfillment and truth to the self with the ideas of action as duty, action as its own spiritual reward, man as a holy vessel."
"The time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology.”"
"I also bought a copy of The New York Times, the previous day's issue of which I had seen the previous day in Puerto Rico. I was interested in newspapers and knew this paper to be one of the foremost in the world. But to read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them; the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself. It made me feel a stranger, that paper."
"Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there."
"The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law."
"Religion now had to have its compartment, almost its social place. The frontier had ceased to exist. And the religions it had bred were beginning slowly to die. In the old days, when men, often of little education, had needed only to declare themselves ministers, people would have seen themselves reflected in the expounders of the Word. This quality of homespun would have made the religions appear creations of a community, personal and close and inviolable. Now a certain distance was needed."
"I never formulated the idea of the universal civilization until 11 years ago, when I traveled for many months in a number of non-Arab Muslim countries — Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan — to try to understand what had driven them to their rage. That Muslim rage was just beginning to be apparent. I thought I would be traveling among people who would be like the people of my own community, the Trinidad Indian community. A large portion of Indians were Muslims; we both had a similar 19th century imperial or colonial history. But it wasn't like that. Despite the history we had in common, I had traveled a different way. Starting with the Hindu background of the instinctive, ritualized life; growing up in the unpromising conditions of colonial Trinidad; I had gone through many stages of knowledge and self-knowledge. I had been granted the ideas of inquiry and the tools of scholarship. I could carry four or five or six different cultural ideas in my head. Now, traveling among non-Arab Muslims, I found myself among a colonized people who had been stripped by their faith of all that expanding cultural and historical knowledge of the world that I had been growing into on the other side of the world."
"One of Joseph Conrad's earliest stories of the East Indies, from the 1890's, was about a local raja or chieftain, a murderous man, a Muslim (though it is never explicitly said), who, in a crisis, having lost his magical counselor, swims out one night to one of the English merchant ships in the harbor to ask the sailors, representatives of the immense power that had come from the other end of the world, for an amulet, a magical charm. The sailors are at a loss; but then someone among them gives the raja a British coin, a sixpence commemorating Queen Victoria's Jubilee; and the raja is well pleased. Conrad didn't treat the story as a joke; he loaded it with philosophical implications for both sides, and I feel now that he saw truly. In the 100 years since that story, the wealth of the world has grown, power has grown, education has spread; the disturbance, the "philosophical shriek" of men at the margin (to use Conrad's words), has been amplified."
"The universal civilization has been a long time in the making. It wasn't always universal; it wasn't always as attractive as it is today. The expansion of Europe gave it for at least three centuries a racial taint, which still causes pain. In Trinidad I grew up in the last days of that kind of racialism. And that, perhaps, has given me a greater appreciation of the immense changes that have taken place since the end of the war, the extraordinary attempt to accommodate the rest of the world, and all the currents of that world's thought. Because my movement within this civilization has been from Trinidad to England, from the periphery to the center, I may have felt certain of its guiding principles more freshly than people to whom these things were everyday. One such realization — I suppose I have sensed it most of my life, but I have understood it philosophically only during the preparation of this talk — has been the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue. This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don't imagine my father's Hindu parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist, and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away."
"Islam is in its origins an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the boil."
"<!-- This commented out section seems to be a paraphrase not precisely located within "Beyond Belief" :"
"To the convert his land is of no religious or historical importance; its relics are of no account; only the sands of Arabia are sacred."
"Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end, life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there."
"I could scarcely bear to look at her eyes. They promised such intimacies."
"I thought how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other person that I had just discovered within myself. It was worth any price, any consequence."
"And whenever I saw Luis, Graça's husband, I dealt with him with a friendship that was quite genuine, since it was offered out of gratitude for Graça's love."
"Before comfort had been squeezed out of the hard land, like blood out of stone."
"I quite like Naipaul's absence of sentiment, but if I have a quarrel with Naipaul, it is that I don't like the way that that absence of sentiment is not conveyed or expressed with richness of metaphor or generosity of character-creating. King Lear is fucking bleak, man, nothing is more bleak, but look how beautiful it is. So while one eschews sentiment because it creates bad art, I think one has got to express bleakness with a generosity of creativity, with music and sensuousness, otherwise it's just a dry, tedious self-denial."
"Naipaul is essentially a writer of discovery. He tries on occasion to look into the past through the evidence of the present. That’s what he did in writing about the ruins of Vijayanagar in India: A Wounded Civilisation. He is not a professional historian, but his insights and perspectives on Indian history are unique and as startling in their accuracy as the observations of his travel."
"(TB: Do you read V. S. Naipaul? Do you like Naipaul?) NH: I read his earlier short story collection Miguel Street over and over when I was a kid. I really liked it. I think it still holds up fairly well, but I haven't read his newer work. He is, of course, notorious amongst his fellow Caribbean writers and everyone else for his outrageously racist and sexist statements. I don't like those. But I find him easy to ignore."
"Naipaul seems to have made himself the spokesman for the permanent, and one's tempted to say, the professional, expatriate from the Third World. His characters savour their marginality. I write about New Americans and New Canadians, about belated homesteaders from nontraditional countries. My characters grow and change with the change in citizenships."
"Naipaul’s legacy will never be entirely straightforward – which does not mean he should not be read, enjoyed, debated and critiqued. Salman Rushdie’s brief tribute to Naipaul indicates the complexities: “We disagreed all our lives, about politics, about literature, and I feel as sad as if I just lost a beloved older brother,” he wrote on Twitter. In an era that yearns to render life in black and white, the complications of VS Naipaul are a reminder that it is more wisely seen in shades of grey."
"I think that there are writers who I don’t necessarily agree with in terms of their politics, but whose writings are sort of a baseline for how to think about certain things — VS Naipaul, for example. … His A Bend in the River starts with the line, "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." And I always think about that line, and I think about his novels when I’m thinking about the hardness of the world sometimes, particularly in foreign policy, and I resist and fight against sometimes that very cynical, more realistic view of the world. And yet, there are times where it feels as if that may be true."
"Let us add one more complication success brings: the illusion of predestination. In this regard I cannot help recalling a long conversation with V. S. Naipaul in which he insisted that he could not have failed as an author, and that recognition, even immediate recognition, of his genius was inevitable, simply because he was so good. I could not persuade him to accept that he only believed this because he had in fact been successful and that it must have been possible, given the world’s perversity, for recognition to have eluded him. The conviction of predestination came after the event."
"The World Is What It Is was a fitting title for the biography of a writer who struggled all his life between poles. On the one hand, there was social and personal anomie, on the other a commitment to vocation. He had a mutated Hindu view that all the world was illusion and only the self was real, and yet his writing showed him observing and reporting the external world with precision. He was a difficult man to get to know. His meaning for the island of his birth, and for the world after the centuries of empires and colonies, “everything of value”, as he put it in his Nobel lecture, was in his books: "I am the sum of my books." In time, that will be seen as his most appropriate epitaph."
"You can tell the values of a nation by its advertisements."
"Many a man who thinks to found a home discovers that he has merely opened a tavern for his friends."
"As to abuse, I thrive on it. Abuse, hearty abuse, is a tonic to all save men of indifferent health."
"To find a friend one must close one eye. To keep him—two."
"[On the Pink Panther films] I had a scene with Peter [Sellers] in my office. He said something like, "Don't worry chief, I'll settle it," and gave me an encouraging wink. So I started winking out of nervousness, and couldn't stop. It wasn't in the script but Blake Edwards [the director] loved it. But it became a problem. I made those films for 20 years, and after 10 years they ran out of good scripts. They used to say to me, "Herbert, wink here, wink." And I said, "I'm not going to wink. You write a good scene and I won't have to wink.""
"Peter [Sellers] was always a mixed-up guy, a childish fellow. But if you're fond of children, you're also fond of childish men. He was always very helpful to me. After he was famous, and when I was still in trouble with the US embassy, he wrote a letter in support of me which was magnificent. But it is true that he was very cruel to his children. He was so hurt by the way children treat you when you're their father. I have been hurt by my children. But he was not in possession of a proper brain when it came to these things."
"He had been fighting with himself longer than he could remember and was still not sure who was winning."
"Immortality had been perfected, at least in its non-biological forms, but insufficient attention had been paid to the boredom of eternity and the corrosive nature of the ratchet effect which demanded ever sharper, stronger and more intense sensations to maintain something like the same level of satisfaction. Living forever turned out to be much like long-term sex, psychologically tricky; which was why what killed the original colonists was not hardship but boredom."
"Apparently this was a design flaw in the unaugmented human brain, a lagging of consciousness behind intent."
"The fifty-third Chuang Tzu wore the very first on his cloak as a diamond buckle. Every emperor became a diamond eventually. It was one of the few advantages of living as a carbon-based life form."
"Gene Newman was Catholic, although not so Catholic that he had more than two children."
"Inside every adult was a child, or so it is said. Professor Petra Mayer was different. Inside Petra Mayer was an impossibly beautiful, barefoot adolescent who wouldn’t have been seen dead giving her inner child the time of day."
"The third nightfall was less impressive than the second, which mirrored a rule Tris had already identified; new emotions devalued, going from intense through familiar to reach a kind of ghost state where one no longer really noticed them at all."
"Why would we do this? she asked, watching smoke trickle towards the ceiling. A whole world of rigid rules covering temperature, convection and Brownian motion all busily pretending to be truly chaotic."
"“That’s impossible,” said Tris. “Most things are,” Luca said, “if you think about them for long enough.”"
"But those would be lies and Tris never lied to herself. At least not more than was required to stay human or sane. Lying to others was different. That was what people like her did if they wanted to remain alive."
"“We’re getting old,” he said. “No,” said Paula Zarte. “You are. I’m just not as young as I was.”"
"The thought came and went, more wish than thought. Maria wasn’t good at considering her own emotions. Most of the time the girl found it hard to believe that what she felt might matter."
"There was no way she could know, but Prisoner Zero asked anyway because he was talking to himself; which was all anyone ever did, it seemed to him, talk to themselves while half meanings and misunderstandings fed into the minds of those who thought they were listening."
"“Any chance you own a hijab?” The answer was no, but Malika could borrow one. Come to that, she could steal one freshly washed off the wall behind her house and claim a sudden, God-inspired attack of modesty if she got caught. The old crows were quite stupid enough to believe that."
"India has had a spiritual freedom never known until lately to the West. Christianity when it came offering its spiritual philosophy of life imposed an iron dogma upon the European peoples. Those who could not accept this dogma, whatever it happened to be at the moment, paid so heavy a penalty that the legend of the Car of Juggernaut (Jagannath) is far truer of Europe than Asia.""
"Whereas in India the soul was free from the beginning to choose what it would, ranging from the dry bread of atheism to the banquets offered by many-colored passionate gods and goddesses, each shadowing forth some different aspect of the One whom in the inmost chambers of her heart India has always adored. Therefore the spiritual outlook was universal. Each took unrebuked what he needed. The children were at home in the house of their father, while Europe crouched under the lash of a capricious Deity whose ways were beyond all understanding."
"But while India fixed her eyes on the Ultimate she did not forget that objective science is the beginning of wisdom. There the foundations of mathematical and mechanical knowledge were well and truly laid by the Noble Race."
"It is the philosophies of this great race that I propose to examine. It is interesting to wonder along what lines it might have developed later if its ancestral heritage had been less diffused and intermingled with other such different stocks as it found in India on arrival, or were forced by many invasions and conquests to accept later."
"And the Mahabharata and Ramayana may in consequence be said to be the Bibles of the people as well as their inexhaustible treasure-houses of story... A treasury of story indeed! I read almost daily in both, marveling at the vast fertility, the tropic splendor of romance unfolded in either, but still more at the nobil- ity of ideals set forth, the great passion for the Unseen, the Beautiful, and Entirely Desirable, both in man and woman, which has always been the soul of India."
"In this vast and little-known epic — a series of gorgeously colored romances of lovely queens and mighty kings, full of a fascination that only those who care for true romance can realize — lies embedded a pearl of whose beauty and luster the world is aware. It is known as the Lord’s Song — or the Song Celestial — and it represents one of the highest flights of the conditioned spirit to its unconditioned Source ever achieved. It is assigned to the fifth century B.C. though opinions as to dates vary."
"There is a place uplifted nine thousand feet in purest air where one of the most ancient tracks in the world runs from India into Tibet."
"Many centuries ago the Ranipur Kingdom was ruled by the Maharao Rai Singh a prince of the great lunar house of the Rajputs. Expecting a bride from some far away kingdom (the name of this is unrecorded) he built the Hall of Pleasure as a summer palace, a house of rare and costly beauty. A certain great chamber he lined with carved figures of the Gods and their stories, almost unsurpassed for truth and life. So, with the pine trees whispering about it the secret they sigh to tell, he hoped to create an earthly Paradise with this Queen in whom all loveliness was perfected. And then some mysterious tragedy ended all his hopes. It was rumoured that when the Princess came to his court, she was, by some terrible mistake, received with insult and offered the position only of one of his women. After that nothing was known. Certain only is it that he fled to the hills, to the home of his broken hope, and there ended his days in solitude, save for the attendance of two faithful friends who would not abandon him even in the ghostly quiet of the winter when the pine boughs were heavy with snow and a spectral moon stared at the panthers shuffling through the white wastes beneath."
"To learn, you must be humble. You must be prepared to admit your ignorance. You must allow yourselves to be filled with the vital information presented to you via the skills and dedication of those who have gone before you down the long path to enlightenment."
"If you are not able to travel, he told me, the next best thing is to read. Read all you can, girl. And store up that knowledge, for you never know when you will need it."
"Better foolish and honest than clever and false."
"Reputation is for those who can afford it."
"For, what is home? Surely more than a set of rooms, a roof, an address? Home suggests belonging. Suggests warmth, safety, companionship. Love."
"There is none so quick to dismiss what they don’t understand as those who are afraid of it. And maybe with reason."
"what can be imagined can be brought into being."
"We are each mistresses of our own happiness. We ought not to look to others to supply it."
"Faith requires no proof. No evidence. No explanation. Faith is entirely a matter of trust and belief. We cannot know, we can only believe."
"there is no courage in being fearless. Do you not know that? A person who knows fear and yet can still think of others, well, he be a brave man."
"Poverty has a way of taking the edge off principles. Hunger can blunt them altogether"
"And as for company … I do not crave the companionship of other women, for I have never found one who did not judge me against herself and find me either to be envied or pitied. As for the friendship of men … well, when the day comes when one is man enough to treat me as his equal, then, only then, will I allow desire to be my guide."
"Nevertheless, disease and misfortune knew no social bounds. Nor did the immensely dangerous business of childbirth"
"And secrets are dangerous. They start small but grow with every evasive answer or outright lie that protects them. Nevertheless, I confess to finding the closeness such conspiracy breeds irresistibly delicious."
"Knowledge cannot be unknown. Experience cannot be unlived."
"How much more tuneful are the birds of the woods than the birds of the water. Ducks and geese make their raucous racket without once finding a note of sweetness, whilst these tree dwellers are practiced in the art of melody."
"Who was it, I wonder, who decided that heartbroken relatives should host a party at the very moment all they wished for was to be left alone to grieve?"
"My mind is like the willow; it flexes and springs. My heart is a knot of oak. Let them try to wound me."
"It’s a brilliant example of a writer in total control of her material, apparently effortlessly inhabiting the minds of her characters and giving them wonderfully individual voices."
"fear it is written somewhere in the terms of my parental contract: Fret frequently about well-being of offspring."
"She needs the hand of friendship extended. Are we not all of us, at some time or another, dependent on the kindness of others? Would we not wish someone to act selflessly for our sake?"
"For whatever time we might have, my love. For whatever time we might have."
"After all, are we not measured by the way in which we treat the most vulnerable members of our society?"
"Slowly Tegan looked up and I saw wonderment on her face. It was of the variety only ever found in those young enough to yet have minds as open as the oceans and hearts longing to have proof of magic."
"Many in Batchcombe have suffered greatly, William. They look for someone to blame. It was my mother who made me see that.” She hesitated, then added, “People fear what they cannot explain."
"Must we always bedeck ourselves in prettiness to be thought pleasing? It would appear so. A woman must look a certain way to be worthy of a man’s attentions. It is expected."
"Non-English quotation."
"Book/Play1 (Book/Play1)"
"Book/Play2 (Book/Play2)"
"The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps."
"Let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things—their looks and their role as mothers."
"People think it's terribly sad to spend Christmas alone, but it's no sadder, really, than spending any other day alone, is it?"
"I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts."
"It’s impossible to resist the kindness of strangers. Someone who looks at you, who doesn’t know you, who tells you it’s OK, whatever you did, whatever you’ve done: you suffered, you hurt, you deserve forgiveness."
"Some days I feel so bad that I have to drink; some days I feel so bad that I can’t."
"[On the early years of the AIDS crisis in New York City.] It was 1982 when we figured that something was really wrong. It was terrible — a kind of plague. I was 33 and the average age of the guys I knew was 36. Between 1979 and 84, about 35 of them died. All in the most horrific way. What was so awful was that everyone thought it was contagious, so they weren’t allowed in the hospital. People stopped shaking hands or kissing when they saw each other. Ivan got ill in 1983. That’s when the lesions started showing up on his face and people would run from us in the street."
"The last time I saw him was at the Columbia medical centre. I walked past this room and saw a guy who looked about 75 and really sick — all shrivelled up, with no hair or teeth. It took me a moment to realise it was Ivan. His body looked lifeless, like there was no blood or sweat in him. But even when he was this bag of bones that could hardly move, he still said that all he needed was rehabilitation and he would get better. Inside I was screaming and thinking: "How could this happen?" But on the outside I was saying: "Yeah, we’ll see what we can do." After the funeral I left for London. The theatre scene in New York had been decimated, and with so many people dying around me I felt it was important that I made the most of my life. I needed to escape the shadow of death."
"Too often, America - the Atlantic model - is cited in policymaking for black Britain. Aside from our similar racial origins, however, black America and black Britain have less in common than meets the eye. Black America is largely monolithic and our roots tend to be Southern Baptist and rural. We have roughly the same accent as a result of segregation and its consequent restriction of movement. We have lived continuously on American soil, most of that time in slavery, for more than half a millennium. (These, by the way, are some of the elements that make Barack Obama seem alien to many black Americans.) Black Britain, on the other hand, is international. It is urban. It has no rural history in this country. Within the living experience and memory of all black Britons are other countries, other cultures. And ironically, because of the impact of biraciality, the term "black" may not define black Britain in the future at all. Therefore, black Britain should concentrate on life as lived here."
"Nick Griffin and many viewers, I’m sure, would have wanted, even expected, me to come across as an abrasive, point-scoring, shouty, finger-pointing black woman. That would have played into Griffin’s game plan, because that is the view of his party. The BNP portrayed me as a "black history fabricator" on its website. There was no way that I was going to live up to any negative mental pictures that it would have had about me, or of any other black woman. Even at the risk of looking "ineffective"."
"What we generally fall to realize is that in talking today to the IndIans we are face to face with the direct descendants, as often as not, of people who were contemporaries of Ancient Egypt, and whose present culture, in most of its mam essentials, is nearly the same as It was then, and is in any event directly descended from that age, and even possibly before it."
"It’s one thing to be looked at, and another to be seen."
"You have always thought if you opened your mouth in open water you would drown, but if you didn't open your mouth you would suffocate. So here you are, drowning."
"What you're trying to say is that it's easier for you to hide in your own darkness, than emerge cloaked in your own vulnerability. Not better, but easier. However the longer you hold it in, the more likely you are to suffocate. At some point, you must breathe."
"Every time you remember something, the memory weakens, as you’re remembering the last recollection, rather than the memory itself. Nothing can remain in tact. Still, it does not stop you wanting, does not stop you longing."
"You ache. You ache all over. You are aching to be you, but you're scared of what it means to do so."
"You know that to love is both to swim and to drown. You know to love is to be a whole, partial, a joint, a fracture, a heart, a bone. It is to bleed and heal. It is to be in the world, honest. It is to place someone next to your beating heart, in the absolute darkness of your inner, and trust they will hold you close. To love is to trust, to trust is to have faith. How else are you meant to love? You knew what you were getting into, but taking the Underground, returning home with no certainty of when you will see her next, it is terrifying."
"It's easier to hide in your own darkness, than to emerge, naked and vulnerable, blinking in your own light."
"Yes, let Art go, if it must be That with it men must starve — If Music, Painting, Poetry Spring from the wasted hearth.Nay, brothers, sing us battle songs With clear and ringing rhyme; Nay, show the world its hateful wrongs, And bring the better time!"
"By its truth and absolute integrity — since Tolstoy I know of no writing so crystal clear — "Jean-Christophe" is the first great book of the twentieth century. In a sense it begins the twenties century. It bridges transition, and shows us where we stand. It reveals the past and the present, and leaves the future open to us ..."
"Bad art has always been used as an escape from life; good art admits of no escape and forces a man to see himself in a glass clearly."
"I nothing know but that I nothing know, And therefore I sing merrily. I sit and watch the thronging moments go, Each taking life from me."
"of an event is unlikely to be interesting after it and this may be the reason why my prophetic utterances regarding the Great War took the form of Satire."
"In February 1911 Gilbert had joined the , proposed by , the playwright, and seconded by and Reginald Geard."
"A thing is no sooner out of fashion than it begins to appear antique; and the literary movements of the are already discounted as a curiosity by the rising generation. The attitude is natural enough; and yet, if the truth be realized, the despised were actually the seed-time of the most characteristic literary harvest of to-day. The apostolic succession of literature is indeed always developing new phases. Without Mr. Kipling there would have been no Mr. Masefield; and it is undoubtedly to the faded audacities of Mr. Arthur Symons and Mr. Richard Le Gallienne that we owe the mor strenuous frankness of Mr. Gilbert Cannan and Rupert Brooke."
"Alas! how truly did he tell her, that the love of ornament creeps slowly, but surely, into the female heart;—that the girl who twines the lily in her tresses, and looks at herself in the clear stream, will soon wish that the lily was fadeless, and the stream a mirror."
"Beauty depends more upon the movement of the face than upon the form of the features when at rest. Thus a countenance habitually under the influence of amiable feelings acquires a beauty of the highest order, from the frequency with which such feelings are the originating causes of the movement or expressions which stamp their character upon it."
"(How much in your books comes from personal experience?) RHYS: If you experience a thing you know you can write it so much more, but life's one thing, a book's another."
"It's a lovely feeling to know you can do exactly as you like."
"The things you remember have no form. When you write about them, you have to give them a beginning, a middle, and an end. To give life shape—that is what a writer does. That is what is so difficult."
"I've noticed that. They believe the lies far more than they believe the truth."
"When I was excited about life, I didn't want to write at all. I've never written when I was happy. I didn't want to. But I've never had a long period of being happy. 'Do you think think anyone has? I think you can be peaceful for a long time. When I think about it, if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write. You see, there's very little invention in my books. What came first with most of them was the wish to get rid of this awful sadness that weighed me down. I found when I was a child that if I could put the hurt into words, it would go. It leaves a sort of melancholy behind and then it goes."
"I suppose the fantastic is what you imagine, but as soon as you do a fantastic thing, it's no longer fantastic, it becomes real."
"One is born either to go with or to go against."
"She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion. ("The Insect World")"
"Ash had fallen. Perhaps it had fallen the night before or perhaps it was still falling. I can only remember in patches. I was looking at it two feet deep on the flat roof outside my bedroom. The ash and the silence. Nobody talked in the street, nobody talked while we ate, or hardly at all. I know now that they were all frightened. They thought our volcano was going up. (beginning of "Heat")"
"There is no control over memory. Quite soon you find yourself being vague about an event which seemed so important at the time that you thought you'd never forget it. Or unable to recall the face of someone whom you could have sworn was there for ever. On the other hand, trivial and meaningless memories may stay with you for life. I can still shut my eyes and see Victoria grinding coffee on the pantry steps, the glass bookcase and the books in it, my father's pipe-rack, the leaves of the sandbox tree, the wallpaper of the bedroom in some shabby hotel, the hairdresser in Antibes. It's in this way that I remember buying the pink milanese silk underclothes, the assistant who sold them to me and coming into the street holding the parcel. (beginning of "On Not Shooting Sitting Birds")"
"One October afternoon Mrs Baker was having tea with Miss Verney and talking about the proposed broiler factory in the middle of the village where they both lived. Miss Verney, who had not been listening attentively, said, 'You know Letty, I've been thinking a great deal about death lately. I hardly ever do, strangely enough.' (beginning of the story "Sleep It Off, Lady")"
"He was intimately acquainted with the police of three countries, and he sat alone in a small restaurant not far from the Boulevard Montparnasse sipping an apéritif moodily, for he disliked Montparnasse and detested solitude. He had left his native Montmartre to dine with a lady and had arrived twenty minutes late. She was not of those usually kept waiting and she had already departed. 'Sacré Floriane', muttered the Chevalier. He looked at a Swedish couple at the next table, at the bald American by the door, and at the hairy Anglo-Saxon novelist in the corner, and thought that they were a strange-looking lot, and exceedingly depressing. (Quelles gueules qu'ils ont, was how he put it.)..."
"...there is peace in despair in exactly the same way as there is despair in peace ("Outside the Machine")"
"...What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. ("Till September Petronella")"
"'Mein Lieb, Mon Cher, My Dear, Amigo,' the letter began (beginning of the story "Tigers Are Better-looking")"
"They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, ‘because she pretty like pretty self’ Christophine said. (first lines)"
"I thought if I told no one it might not be true."
"I woke the next morning knowing that nothing would be the same. It would change and go on changing."
"So it was all over, the advance and retreat, the doubts and hesitations. Everything finished, for better or for worse. (first lines)"
"I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds — with God's help I catch some."
"She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it."
"It was a beautiful place - wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I'd find myself thinking, 'What I see is nothing - I want what it hides - that is not nothing'."
"Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow."
""...Money have pretty face for everybody, but for that man money pretty like pretty self, he can't see nothing else."
"'Quite like old times,' the room says. 'Yes? No?' There are two beds, a big one for madame and a smaller one on the opposite side for monsieur. The wash-basin is shut off by a curtain. It is a large room, the smell of cheap hotels faint, almost imperceptible. The street outside is narrow, cobble-stoned, going sharply uphill and ending in flight of steps. What they call an impasse. I have been here five days. I have decided on a place to eat in at midday, a place to eat in at night, a place to have my drink in after dinner. I have arranged my little life."
"I...think about being hungry, being cold, being hurt, being ridiculed, as if it were in another life than this. This damned room - it's saturated with the past. . . .It's all the rooms I've ever slept in, all the streets I've ever walked in. Now the whole thing moves in an ordered, undulating procession past my eyes. Rooms, streets, streets, rooms. . . ."
"It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside yourself was different. Not just the difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey. But a difference in the way I was frightened and the way I was happy. (first lines of Part One)"
"I don't know how people live when they know exactly what's going to happen to them each day. (Part One, 7th section)"
"...There's fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world. (Part One, 9th section)"
"It's funny when you feel as if you don't want anything more in your life except to sleep, or else to lie without moving. That's when you can hear time sliding past you, like water running. (Part two, 1st section)"
"She seemed to be contemplating a future at once monotonous and insecure with an indifference which was after all a sort of hard-won courage. (chapter 3)"
"It was the darkness that got you. It was heavy darkness, greasy and compelling. It made walls round you, and shut you in so that you felt like you could not breathe. (chapter 3)"
""It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong." (chapter 4)"
"She said 'darling' with her lips, but her heart was dead. (chapter 5)"
"When you were nineteen, and it was the first time you had been let down, you did not make scenes. You felt as if your back was broken, as if you would never move again. But you did not make a scene. That started later on, when the same thing had happened five or six times over, and you were supposed to be getting used to it. (chapter 6)"
"The last time you were happy about nothing; the first time you were afraid about nothing. Which came first? (chapter 12)"
"When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul. (chapter 12)"
"'They touch life with gloves on. They're pretending about something all the time. Pretending quite nice and decent things, of course. But still...' 'Everybody pretends,' Marya was thinking..."
"She spent the foggy day in endless, aimless walking, for it seemed to her that if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her. It was a vague and shadowy fear of something cruel and stupid that had caught her and would never let her go. She had always known that it was there - hidden under the more of less pleasant surface of things. Always. Ever since she was a child. You could argue about hunger or cold or loneliness, but with that fear you couldn't argue. It went too deep. You were too mysteriously sure of its terror. You could only walk very fast and try to leave it behind you."
"no good ever comes from being too polite. (p40)"
"They sat at a corner table in the little restaurant, eating with gusto and noise after the manner of simple-hearted people who like their neighbours to see and know their pleasures. (beginning of "Trio")"
"One of those cold, heavy days in spring - a hard sky with a glare behind the cloud, all the new green of the trees hanging still and sullen. (beginning of "The Grey Day")"
"Funny how it's slipped away, Vienna. Nothing left but a few snapshots. (beginning of "Vienne")"
"the search for illusion a craving, almost a vice, the stolen waters and the bread eaten in secret of [her] life. ("Illusion")"
"It was obvious that this was not an Anglo-Saxon: he was too gay, too dirty, too unreserved and in his little eyes was such a mellow comprehension of all the sins and the delights of life. He was drinking rapidly one glass of beer after another, smoking a long, curved pipe, and beaming contentedly on the world. The woman with him wore a black coat and skirt; she had her back to us. I said: 'Who's the happy man in the corner? I've never seen him before.'"
"One shuts one's eyes and sees it written: red letters on a black ground: Le Saut dans l'Inconnu. . . . Le Saut... Stupidly I think: But why in French? Of course it must be a phrase I have read somewhere. Idiotic. I screw up my eyes wildly to get rid of it: next moment it is back again. Red letters on a black ground. One lies staring at the exact shape of the S."
"I wonder too if I am terribly excited about something that has been done ages ago (1964)"
"Very few people change after well say seven or seventeen. Not really. They get more this or more that and of course look a bit different. But inside they are the same. (1955)"
"I don't believe in the individual Writer so much as in Writing. It uses you and throws you away when you are not useful any longer. But it does not do this until you are useless and quite useless too. Meanwhile there is nothing to do but plod along line by line. (1953)"
"Everyone does seem very pessimistic about the future of writing and art in general. But hasn't it always been a fight? I remember how very bitter most of the English in Paris were about that very subject ages ago. (1953)"
"I usually dislike my books, sometimes, don't want to touch them. But the Next One will be a bit better. I am always excited and forget all failures and all else. (1953)"
"Writing can be (among other things), a safety valve. (1949)"
"I like emotion, I approve of it-in fact am capable of wallowing in it. (1946)"
"I think that the Anglo-Saxon idea that you can be rude with impunity to any female who has written a book is utterly damnable. You come and have a look out of curiosity and then allow the freak to see what you think of her. It's only done to the more or less unsuccessful and only by Anglo-Saxons. Well... if it were my last breath I'd say HELL TO IT and to the people who do it- (1936)"
"You see I don't even know myself and am really trying to argue it out with myself - anyway it isn't very important. (1934)"
"I am always being told that until my work ceases being "sordid and depressing" I haven't much chance of selling. (1931)"
"When I moved to Scotland, I discovered Jean Rhys, and she became a haunting influence on my work...As in the case of Jean Rhys, writers who moved to Britain in their youth struck a special chord with me as outsiders grappling with issues similar to my own—Abdulrazak Gurnah, Buchi Emecheta, Ahdaf Soueif."
"It was in the States that I saw my first ever copy of Jean Rhys. It was her book, Voyage in the Dark. It was the simplicity and beauty of the prose that I loved. But it was a horrible book, really, for a young girl to read. Jean Rhys felt she was a victim. I tried to tell her that. I only met her once, in London, with her husband. Her style was so pure but she wrote about impure things."
"of the five collected novels, the one that hit home the hardest was Voyage in the Dark. Reading it was a painful voyage into my own cluelessness and powerlessness, a voyage that many young women of my generation, on the cusp of the women's movement, had embarked upon...Rhys's portrayals of young women who fall prey to rapacious situations, canaries in the mine shaft of patriarchy, smart girls with nowhere to go but the wrong man's arms or Anna Karenina's train tracks, spoke to many of us embarking on our journeys...by allowing her female characters a full range of feelings and not airbrushing them into simple virtuous victimhood, Rhys liberates us all from the danger of a single, monochrome self and story...That ability to imagine a life so intimately and richly is Jean Rhys's gift to us. For that she should have been knighted. Instead, I'd like to imagine her even rather happy (perhaps!) with what her stories have become: food to nourish all our souls."
"I admire Jean Rhys, especially Wide Sargasso Sea, but she is too limited by her pathology."
"A reader new to Rhys usually puzzles over her viewpoint looking both ways across the channel and the Atlantic, she seems for and against both perspectives. Her insider-outsider's treatment of England, France and the Caribbean gnaws at comfortable ethnocentricisms.... Looking for some kind of familiar ground, the reader tries to fit Rhys into available models of contemporary fiction, and fails. She belongs to no recognizable school, fits into no ready-made slot. Rhys's fiction belongs, as she did, to worlds whose mutual understanding has "the feeling...of... things that... couldn't fit together." The dissonances of seemingly different worlds inform the Rhysian novel, finding coherence in her art...All her work is charged with a sense of belonging in many wheres at once."
"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, Mercé Rodoreda, to name but a few."
"Jean Rhys maddens me because she's got this wonderful art-deco prose style, and all it does is paint the same picture of the thwarted woman who's got out of an unbearable relationship but who sees nothing before her except the possibility of another unbearable relationship which she'll be in just as long as she can bear it, and then she'll be back sitting in the corner of this cafe with some single glass of absinthe that she has to make last for four hours because she can only afford one glass. This is after leaving Mr. Mackenzie and before meeting Mr. Somebody Else. I think, "Oh, Jean, for God's sake" - this is so empty and so self-regarding, an exquisite piece of nothing. Just paper cutouts."
"...Jean Rhys, I think, wrote the best West Indian novel...Wide Sargasso Sea."
"Wide Sargasso Sea has 190 pages of words, and each one was weighed and considered in relation to every other in a way that I have never seen except in a poem. It is a poem, and, to paraphrase its author, all her life was in it. How much this is literally true can be seen from her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please (1979). From the portrait of her mother and their antagonistic relationship, to her descriptions of Black people, and her own feelings of being an outcast among white and Black, even to the vegetation, the parrot, the patchwork quilt-the West Indian terrain of Wide Sargasso Sea is shown to be drawn from her own life there. Ms. Rhys, from childhood in the West Indies and adulthood in Europe, had many scores to settle and her creation of Antoinette was for the purpose of settling them. She wanted to burn down all that Rochester symbolized on her own behalf as a West Indian woman, and she wanted us to know. In the original Brontë story of Jane Eyre, the first Mrs. Rochester's maiden name was Mason. Ms. Rhys gives Antoinette another name so that both her mother and father are Creole and the European Mason is the stepfather. The name she gives her is Cosway or causeway, the bridge between the Third World and Europe, between one race and another, a causeway from defeat to victory. I believe it is a triumph for us as women, for all of us as citizens of the world."
"No one captured epic sadness as well as Jean Rhys, and none of her books captured it as unapologetically as Good Morning, Midnight"
"Miss Rhys's work seems to me to be so very good, so vivid, so extraordinarily distinguished by the rendering of passion, and so true, that I wish to be connected with it."
"somebody who has confirmed my vision of literature is Jean Rhys...when I read Jean Rhys’s first novel, I never imagined that she was inventing. It fascinated me, I liked it because she breaks with the vision of woman in literature as a docile, noble creature, influenced by her family and everything. I read all of her works, and I thought that I knew her very well, until I finally realized that she had invented herself completely, so much so that she forbade them to write her biography because she didn’t want the public to see that she was different from the protagonists she had created. I was very pleased because I felt that rather than being a strange phenomenon I was somebody connected to another writer in a different country."
"That fire you lit our beacon to safe harbour in the islands."
"...Jean Rhys or Octavia Butler, lady writers much loved but rarely copied. There's too much freedom in them."
"...she was very serious about writing. She was a funny woman, and very vain and coquettish about her appearance...she was a very truthful person...She had a far more interesting life than appears in those unfinished memoirs."
"Most English people have heard the name of the Mughals. They have believed that the Mughal Empire was the predecessor to British rule in India. Therefore, they are surprised to learn that in the initial phase of British conquest, the English conquerors did not engage in conflict with any Mughal, whereas their struggle with the Marathas continued incessantly. Many people must be curious about who these Marathas were, who really destroyed the Mughal Empire, who fought with the English and the French to gain control over India, who once again revolted in 1857 and clashed arms with the British rule, and among whom emerged revolutionary leaders as politically astute as Nana Sahib and as brave as the Rani of Jhansi."
"I'm English, so obviously do not have a philosophy. I am a Christian, though, if you want to know about important beliefs."
"Attila the Hun remains to this day a byword for savagery and destruction. His is one of the few names from antiquity that still prompt instant recognition, putting him alongside the likes of Alexander, Caesar, Cleopatra and Nero. Attila has become the barbarian of the ancient world."
"It is widely believed that Christianity remained an essentially urban cult and that the population of the countryside clung for generations to the old beliefs. The word 'pagan' comes from paganus, or someone who lived in the countryside (pagus). Unfortunately, we know so little about the religious life in rural areas that this remains conjectural. Paganus was usually derogatory – something like 'yokel' or 'hick' would give the right idea – and may just reflect the common belief of urban dwellers that countrymen were dull and backward."
"On 2 August 216 BC the Carthaginian General Hannibal won one of the most complete battlefield victories in history. Outnumbered nearly two to one, his heterogeneous army of Africans, Spaniards and Celts not merely defeated, but virtually destroyed the Roman army opposing them....The scale of the losses at Cannae was unrivalled until the industrialised slaughter of the First World War."
"Most battles from the Ancient World are now all but forgotten, for military as well as civil education has ceased to be based fundamentally on the Classics. Yet Cannae is still regularly referred to in the training programmes of today's army officers. Hannibal's tactics appear almost perfect, the classic example of double envelopment, and ever since many commanders have attempted to reproduce their essence and their overwhelming success. Nearly all have failed."
"Hannibal won the battle through not only his dynamic leadership and the high quality of his army, but also because of a good deal of luck. Cannae was not an exercise in pure tactics, but, like all battles, a product both of the military doctrines and technology of the time and the peculiar circumstances of a specific campaign."
"It was very difficult to disable an opponent with a single blow; either a heavy strike to the head, a massive thrust past shield and through any armour to the body, or a hit on the leg breaking the bone and causing the victim to fall. Attempting to deliver such a strong cut or thrust exposed the attacker to greater risk of wounding, especially as his right arm, and perhaps part of his right side, lost the protection of his shield. It was less risky to deliver weaker attacks to the unprotected extremities of an opponent, even though this was unlikely to kill him quickly."
"The Roman legion was supposed to operate with wide gaps between its maniples and significant intervals between each of the three lines. The openness of its formation allowed the legion to advance without falling into disorder even over comparatively rough terrain. It is impossible, even for well drilled troops, to march in a perfectly straight line, and the more uneven the terrain, the more probable that a unit will veer to one side or the other. The wide intervals between the maniples of the legion allowed them to cope with such deviation without units colliding and merging together and ceasing to be independent tactical entities. The unusual formation adopted by the Roman infantry at Cannae sacrificed this openness and with it most of the flexibility of the manipular system."
"Hasdrubal had led his close order cavalry in a devastatingly brutal charge against the Roman right wing, shattering and virtually destroying it in a brief pursuit. The Carthaginian had kept his men under tight control and, when they had rested and reformed, he led them behind the Roman main line, moving against Varro on the left, and ignoring the massed infantry in the enemy centre. Varro's allied horsemen were still engaged in their stand-off with the Numidians, but the sight of the lines of Hasdrubal's Gauls and Spaniards approaching from the rear utterly shattered their spirit. Without waiting for the Carthaginians to charge home, the Roman left wing dissolved into a panicked flight in which the consul joined. Their position was untenable, and, if they had in fact formed with their flank on the hills around Cannae, any delay in flight might have resulted in their being trapped. They could not have won any combat with a more numerous enemy attacking from two sides, but their flight sealed the fate of the Roman army."
"There is a nightmarish quality about many of the descriptions of the aftermath of Cannae....Later sources would invent further horrors, claiming that Hannibal bridged the River Aufidius with Roman corpses. The reality of Cannae was probably even more appalling than such horrific inventions, for it remains one of the bloodiest single day's fighting in history, rivalling the massed slaughter of the British Army on the first day of the Somme offensive in 1916."
"Although he paid attention to the effectiveness of the Roman military system, Polybius believed that Rome's success rested far more on its political system. For him the Republic's constitution, which was carefully balanced to prevent any one individual or section of society from gaining overwhelming control, granted Rome freedom from the frequent revolution and civil strife that had plagued most Greek city-states. Internally stable, the Roman Republic was able to devote itself to waging war on a scale and with a relentlessness unmatched by any rival. It is doubtful that any other contemporary state could have survived the catastrophic losses and devastation inflicted by Hannibal, and still gone on to win the war."
"Lucius Cornelius Sulla was a man of striking appearance, with exceptionally fair skin, piercing grey eyes and reddish hair. In later life his appearance was marred by a skin condition that speckled his face with red patches. (An obscure piece of military law from several centuries later also claims that he had only one testicle, and that his achievements make it clear that such a defect was no bar to becoming a successful soldier.) Sulla could be very charming, winning over soldier and senator alike, but many aristocrats remained deeply uncertain of him. In spite of his late entry into public life he had been reasonably successful, and demonstrated his military skill on repeated occasions. His consulship came when he was fifty, which was unusually old for a first term, and in the preceding decade it had taken two attempts for him to win the praetorship. Many senators probably found it hard to forget the poverty of his youth and the decay of his family. It is common for those who flourish under any system to feel that the failure of others is deserved. Sulla had been poor and revelled in the company of actors and musicians, professions considered extremely disreputable. Such behaviour was bad enough in his youth, and far worse for a senator and magistrate, but Sulla remained loyal to his old friends throughout his life. He was a heavy drinker, enjoyed feasting and was widely believed to be very active sexually, taking both men and women as lovers. For much of his life he publicly associated with the actor Metrobius, who specialised in playing female roles on stage, and the pair were believed to be having an affair."
"Roman laws tended to be long and complex — one of Rome's most enduring legacies to the world is cumbersome and tortuous legal prose."
"The Ptolemies were Macedonians, with an admixture of a little Greek and via marriage with the Seleucids a small element of Syrian blood. (There is no evidence to make us question the paternity of any of the line and suggest that they were the product of an illicit liaison between the queen and a man other than her husband. This remains possible, if not very likely, but an uncertain basis for any argument.) The Macedonians were not an homogenous people and seem to have varied considerably in appearance and colouring. Alexander the Great was fair-haired, although it is always difficult to know precisely what this meant. A Roman copy of an earlier mosaic shows him with medium-brown hair. Fair might simply mean not black or very dark brown. On the other hand, several of the early Ptolemies were blond and comparisons of their hair to gold suggest this was more than simply not black-haired."
"Cleopatra may have had black, brown, blonde, or even red hair, and her eyes could have been brown, grey, green or blue. Almost any combination of these is possible. Similarly, she may have been very light skinned or had a darker more Mediterranean complexion. Fairer skin is probably marginally more likely given her ancestry."
"There were no political parties at Rome as we would understand them, nor were elections primarily contests about policy. Quite openly, voters selected on the basis of perceived character and past behaviour rather than the views a candidate expressed. Where an individual's nature was not obvious, the Roman people tended to be drawn to a famous name, for there was a sense that virtue and ability were inherited."
"When Crassus left for his province he was hounded by a tribune who formally called on the gods to curse the proconsul and the unjust war he planned. Personal hatreds and rivalry loomed larger in most senators' minds than the good of the Republic."
"Augustus pursued power relentlessly and then clung to it, whatever he might pretend in public. Such ambition is surely the hallmark of any successful political leader – and no doubt plenty of less successful ones. Yet in his case he made use of that power for the common good. He worked hard to make the res publica function again, and we cannot deny that he succeeded, since the peace and stability he imposed brought ever greater levels of prosperity. At a basic level more people were better-off under his principate than they had been for several generations. The concerns he dealt with were traditional ones, even if some of his methods were innovative. Julius Caesar had tried to address several of these issues, as had others, but none had the chance to deal with them as thoroughly as Augustus. In the process he made sure that it was well known that he was working for the common good, but once again such advertising was what any Roman politician would have done. By doing favours for individuals and whole communities he placed them in his debt, and so, as so often, personal advantage was intertwined with the wider good. That does not alter the fact that he did rule well, whatever his motivation."
"'I have not heard you swear.Waste of good anger,' Ferox said without looking at him. It was something his grandfather had often said. Do not waste rage. Nurture it, cherish it and use the strength it gives. Hot anger gets a man killed. Cold anger will put the other man in the earth."
"A man who keeps asking you to trust him is always hiding something."
"Untrustworthy people tend to be selfish, which makes them simple to understand."
"I would call it inhuman cruelty if that made sense, but it cannot because it was done by men and not monsters."
"Karen has many privileges. She must learn not to take, always, the extra inch when the ell is so gladly granted."
"These insolent words, hurled at it, convulsed the livid face that fronted Karen. And suddenly, holding Karen's shoulders and leaning forward, Madame von Marwitz broke into tears, horrible tears—in all her life Karen had never pitied her as she pitied her then—sobbing with raking breaths: "No, no; it is too much. Have I not loved him with a saintly love, seeking to uplift what would draw me down? Has he not loved me? Has he not sought to be my lover? And he can spit upon me in the dust!""
"Her eyes came back to Karen's face and fury again seized her. "And as for you, ungrateful girl—perfidious, yes, and insolent one—you deserve to be denounced to the world.""