"The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand
over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies."
"So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in
the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless
, hairless, expresionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying
to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even
fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth.
Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without
completing the cycle back to reality."
"The straying dreams of men
May bring them ghosts of joy:
But as they drowse, the waking ambers burn them;
Or they walk with fixed eyes as blind men walk.
But the ancient wisdom speaks for our own time:
Fate works most for woe
With Folly's fairest show.
Man's little pleasure is the spring of sorrow."
(Ode 2, Antistrophe 2)
"Ours had been a wayward gypsy music, leading down all kinds of foolish gypsy
ways, unforgiven. I was glad of it, I had almost caught the rhythm of it,
the dancing, clicking jangle of it during the summer."
"If only I had taken advantage of the situation; seized and held and prized
the multitude of advantages the summer offered me; if only I had."
"To slam the door impulsively on the past, to shed everything down to my last
bit of clothing, to break the pattern of my life-that complex design I had been
weaving since birth with all it's dark threads, its unexplainable symbols set
against a conventional background of domestic schoolboy white and schoolboy
blue, all those tangled strands which required the dexterity of a virtuoso to
keep flowing..."
"I was used to finding something deadly in things that attracted me; there was
always something deadly lurking in anything I wanted, anything I loved.
And if it wasn't there...then I put it there myself."
"...sucessfully overcame that bad habit of living, so highly desirable to
be got rid of by some people"
"...London was decidedly overrated"
"So throughout our life our worst weaknesses and meanesses are usually
committed for the sake of those whom we most despise."
