"I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make despair pause. For in truth we who are creatures of impulse are not creatures of despair."

"As to honour — you know — it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs."

"One wonders that there can be found a man courageous enough to occupy the post. It is a matter of meditation. Having given it a few minutes I come to the conclusion in the serenity of my heart and the peace of my conscience that he must be either an extreme megalomaniac or an utterly unconscious being."

"The future is of our own making — and (for me) the most striking characteristic of the century is just that development, that maturing of our consciousness which should open our eyes to that truth."

"Facing it — always facing it — that's the way to get through."

"The sea never changes and its works, for all the talk of men, are wrapped in mystery."

"Running all over the sea trying to get behind the weather."

"One must have lived on such diet to discover what ghastly trouble the necessity of swallowing one's food become."

"She strode like a grenadier, was strong and upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face, a candid brow, pure eyes, and not a thought of her own in her head."

"Egoism, which is the moving force of the world, and altruism, which is its morality, these two contradictory instincts, of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism."

"The more I write the less substance do I see in my work, … It is tolerably awful. And I face it, I face it but the fright is growing on me. My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does not move; its eyes are baleful; it is as still as death itself — and it will devour me. Its stare has eaten into my soul already deep, deep."

"What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it."

"It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose."

"When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effect."

"Above all, we must forgive the unhappy souls who have elected to make the pilgrimage on foot, who skirt the shore and look uncomprehendingly upon the horror of the struggle, the joy of victory, the profound hopelessness of the vanquished."

"Socialism must inevitably end in Caesarism. ... Disestablishment, Land Reform, Universival Brotherhood are but like milestones on the road to ruin."

"It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval."

"I want so much to cling to something solid and steady."

"In fact, the real problem with the thesis of A Genealogy of Morals is that the noble and the aristocrat are just as likely to be stupid as the plebeian. I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds — to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it — while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate — or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems."

"Barbara wrote that his brain frightened her. It was sharp and clear and cruel. She admired him for being always unsentimental, but noted 'always remember to rely on yourself … if you are in a sticky place he will be so interested in noting your reactions that he will probably forget to rescue you.'"

"Greene, we agreed, is a Jekyll and Hyde character, who has not succeeded in fusing the two sides of himself into any kind of harmony. There is conflict within him, and therefore he is liable to pursue conflict without."

"Graham Greene is unique-a questing lucidity that no other writer in the English language can come near. Why hasn't he got the Nobel Prize? We have all learned so much from him, as writers and readers."

"At the end of what is called the "sexual life" the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship."

"Can you hate something you don't believe in? And yet he called himself a free-thinker. What an impossible paradox, to be free and to be so obsessed."

"Under my cloak, a fig for the King!"

"There's a virtue in slowness, which we have lost"

"Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt."

"It was not the kind of surroundings in which any one with free will — if such a man existed — would have chosen to await death."

"Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong."

"Simplicity belonged by right to those who were native-born, those who could take the conditions of life, however bizarre, for granted."

"It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognised plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and almost forgotten."

"God...created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed — that is the meaning of evolution."

"I had very good dentures once. Some magnificent gold work. It’s the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate."

"Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully."

"There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives."

"Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism … is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a politique....Catholics and communists have commited great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate...if you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?"

"We mustn’t complain too much of being comedians—it’s an honourable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed—that’s all. We are bad comedians, we aren’t bad men."

"I have often noticed that a bribe...has that effect — it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman."

"However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature."

"Cynicism is cheap—you can buy it at any Monoprix store—it’s built into all poor-quality goods."

"Those who marry God can become domesticated too—it’s just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word “Love” means a formal touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and “Ave Maria” like “dearest” is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world’s marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves—it was God’s taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night."

"Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it."

"Reality in our century is not something to be faced."

"In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey."

"What right had I to value her less than the bodies in the square? Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel. I had judged like a journalist, in terms of quantity, and I had betrayed my own principles; I had become as engage as Pyle, and it seemed to me that no decision would ever be simple again."

"Sooner or later...one has to take sides – if one is to remain human."

"He’ll always be innocent, you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity."

"The hurt is in the act of possession; we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower."

"“Oh, I’m not a Berkeleian. I believe my back’s against this wall. I believe there’s a sten gun over there.”"