"The City is of Night, but not of Sleep; There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain; The pitiless hours like years and ages creep, A night seems termless hell."

"As I came through the desert thus it was, As I came through the desert: All was black, In heaven no single star, on earth no track; A brooding hush without a stir or note; The air so thick it clotted in my throat."

"Yet I strode on austere; No hope could have no fear."

"The street-lamps burn amidst the baleful glooms, Amidst the soundless solitudes immense Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs."

"Yet why evoke the spectres of black night To blot the sunshine of exultant years?"

"The City is of Night; perchance of Death, But certainly of Night; for never there Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath After the dewy dawning's cold grey air."

"The world rolls round for ever like a mill; It grinds out death and life and good and ill; It has no purpose, heart or mind or will."

"For life is but a dream whose shapes return, Some frequently, some seldom, some by night And some by day."

"We will rush ever on without fear; Let the goal be far, the flight be fleet! For we carry the Heavens with us, dear, While the Earth slips from our feet!"

"Give a man a horse he can ride, Give a man a boat he can sail; And his rank and wealth, his strength and health, On sea nor shore shall fail."

"Give a man a girl he can love, As I, O my love, love thee; And his heart is great with the pulse of Fate, At home, on land, on sea."

"As we rush, as we rush in the train, The trees and the houses go wheeling back, But the starry heavens above that plain Come flying on our track."

"The mighty river flowing dark and deep, With ebb and flood from the remote sea-tides, Vague-sounding through the City’s sleepless sleep, Is named the River of the Suicides."

"The wine of Love is music, And the feast of Love is song: And when Love sits down to the banquet, Love sits long:Sits long and rises drunken, But not with the feast and the wine; He reeleth with his own heart, That great, rich Vine."

"What good, what use, what aim? What compensation for the throes of birth And death in all its frame? What conscious life hath ever paid its cost? From Nothingness to Nothingness — all lost!"

"I have no concern for the common man except that he should not be so common."

"April, April, laugh thy girlish laughter, and the moment after, Weep thy girlish tears, April."

"Youth is the time for loving, So poets often say."

"But you mustn't be too sane, darlings. It really won't do in this family."

"Life isn't just to be found, you have to work for it."

"Between Margaret's fine-edged art and Gladys's rough simplicity, where did the greater feminine solace lie? True art, after all, is simple."

"His fiction – radical, satirical, polyvalent, sexually courageous, global – extended the mainstream novel, and led it somewhere else. Still not fully recognized, he was one of Britain's greatest late-twentieth-century writers."

"Life can't be put on paper in all its complexity."

"All writers know aspects of life that they take very much for granted, that yet to their readers appear peculiar, special."

"In writing novels I have never been able to place much importance upon the distinction between real and imagined. A novelist, it seems to me, makes as much or as little use of the real world as he needs to project his vision of life."

"[T]he impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life."

"People are able to live with only half a heart, to live without real compassion, because they are able to use words that are only forms."

"When was reviewing Doris Lessing's last two books from the Shikasta series, I found that she has discovered what I, to my great joy, had discovered a little earlier: that (a) if you're writing what they call science fiction, you're absolutely free-you can write anything you damn please, and (b) that if you take seriously the science fiction premise, you are furnished with an inexhaustable supply of absolutely beautiful and complex metaphors for our present situation, for who and where we are now, and I think it's not only women who have found this out. Angus Wilson was one of the first to do this with The Old Man in the Zoo years ago. That is a science fiction novel, if you look at it closely."

"God knows how you Protestants can be expected to have any sense of direction," she said. "It's different with us, I haven't been to mass for years, I've got every mortal sin on my conscience, but I know when I'm doing wrong. I'm still a Catholic, it's there, nothing can take it away from me." "Of course, duckie," said Jeremy... "once a Catholic always a Catholic."

"The opportunities for heroism are limited in this kind of world: the most people can do is sometimes not to be as weak as they’ve been at other times."

"The roots of art and play lie very close together."

"Angus Wilson says in Wild Garden that most of his books begin with a visual image; one of them began when he saw these two people arguing and he had to find out what they were arguing about, who they were. That fits in beautifully with the kind of visual image that started The Left Hand of Darkness."

"The English can laugh and at the same time strike you down, without the least compunction. It is the secret of their success as a nation."

"He had the satisfied countenance of a man who has never succeeded in boring himself."

"One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines."

"What captivity has been to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish. For us, the romance of our native land begins only after we have left home; it is really only with other people that we become Irishmen."

"The smell of the library was always the same – the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the chief librarian had once described as "the steam of the social soup"."

"No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his poetry, we can join him there."

"Only those with great ambitions know what great fears drive them forward."

"London goes beyond any boundary or convention. It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London."

"I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned."

"As well as any bloom upon a flower I like the dust on the nettles, never lost Except to prove the sweetness of a shower."

"I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds, Sniff them and think and sniff again and try Once more to think what it is I am remembering, Always in vain. I cannot like the scent, Yet I would rather give up others more sweet, With no meaning, than this bitter one."

"The simple lack Of her is more to me Than others' presence."

"Far more I feared all company: too sharp, too rude, Had been the wisest or the dearest human voice. What I desired I knew not, but whate'er my choice Vain it must be, I knew."

"The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet."

"I read Edward Thomas for a breath of air."

"The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood This Eastertide call into mind the men, Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should Have gathered them and will do never again."

"I built myself a house of glass: It took me years to make it: And I was proud. But now, alas! Would God someone would break it."

"I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding-sheet and her worms to fill in the grave, and her grass to cover it pitifully up, adding flowers—as an unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero."