“If faces were different when lit from above or below — what was a face? What was anything?”

He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things. He talked to them, urging them, ordering them. Driven back by the tide, his footprints became bays in which they were trapped and gave him the illusion of mastery.

Worse than madness. Sanity.

People don’t help much.

A star appeared…and was momentarily eclipsed by some movement.

The thing is – fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream.

He lost himself in a maze of thoughts that were rendered vague by his lack of words to express them. Frowning, he tried again.

He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life,where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one’s waking life was spent watching one’s feet.

The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.

Together, joined in effort by the burden, they staggered up the last steep of the mountain. Together, they chanted One! Two! Three! and crashed the log on to the great pile. Then they stepped back, laughing with triumphant pleasure.

Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!

Graham Greene at 82 years old was still writing, and I don’t think anyone can deny the force, the expertise, and the unique quality of his writing, if you take his complete oeuvre.

Of the authors writing in English, I’d mention Shakespeare and Milton. But all this is terribly high-hat and makes me sound very po-faced, I’m afraid; however, I just happen to like these enormous, swinging, great creatures.

There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.

Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.

There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.

His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.

When Celtic get an opportunity to go above Rangers they’ve got to jump at it with both hands.

she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.

Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.

What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.

Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.

It certainly is gravy every day above ground right now, after kicking that heroin habit.

In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets’ nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.