Margaret is kindled by it, exalted for a time, sees it as passion, glows and becomes rounded, but only for a time. After a year it is completely naked, apparent to her, that he is alone, that he...

lofting itself massively into the low-hanging clouds of the sky. In the early drab twilight it looked like an immense old gray elephant erecting himself somberly on his front legs, his haunches lost...

She was a good girl, he said to himself. He was thinking without quite phrasing it that no other person had ever understood him so fully, and he felt a secret relief as he realized that she had...

He had been given the job and he was going to do it. But now for the first time he hated it genuinely. Perhaps there had been too many fatigue-products, perhaps the cumulative labor had dissolved and...

If punishment is at all proportionate to the offense, then power becomes watered. The only way you generate the proper attitude of awe and obedience is through immense and disproportionate power.

You men are a bunch of god-damned women.

About a week after they had come back, a load of mail came to the island. They were the first letters the men had received in several weeks, and for a night it relieved the changeless pattern of their...

It was probably a damn sight easier than getting rid of a woman who had found something in him that he didn't have or he didn't care to give.

Goldstein, you'd be a pretty good boy if you wasn't so chicken.

Hearn's death was happily smudged, or at least on the surface, but ever since the second ambush he had been feeling the apprehension of a man in a dream who knows he is guilty, is waiting for his...

American's capacity for real estate improvement; build yourself a house, grow fat in it, and die.

Roth was irritated. Just because he was a Jew too, they always assumed he felt the same way about things. It made him feel a little frustrated. No doubt some of his bad luck had come because he was...

He knew that again now. Hennessey's death had opened to Croft vistas of such omnipotence that he was afraid to consider it directly. All day the fact hovered about his head, tantalizing him with odd...

You know," he laughed easily, "with all the goddam drinkin' Ah've done, Ah still can't remember the taste of it unless Ah got the bottle right with me.

There was the old myth of divine intervention. You blasphemed, and a lightning bolt struck you. That was a little steep too. If punishment is at all proportionate to the offense, then power becomes...

Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get.

His decision had been made in the valley, and it lay as an iron warp in his mind. He could have turned back no more easily than he could have killed himself.

The moments like these, the passing doubts, were the temptations that caught you if you were not careful.

It takes all kinds to make a world.

City Point is so beautiful, she says. In the night they cannot see the garbage that litters the beach, the seaweed and driftwood, the condoms that wallow sluggishly on the foam's edge, discarded on...

I HATE EVERYTHING WHICH IS NOT IN MYSELF

The best they could? I don't think so. He paused as if to edit his woes and select the most telling ones. Did you notice how they treated the officers? They slept in staterooms when we were jammed in...

Everything was damp and rife and hot as though the jungle were an immense collection of oily rags growing hotter and hotter under the dark stifling vaults of a huge warehouse. Heat licked at...

The book was sloppily written in many parts {the words came too quickly and too easily} and there was hardly a noun in any sentence that was not holding hands with the nearest and most commonly...

The jeep would round the bend, be hit by a dozen bullets at once, and that would be the end of his petty history of unfocused groping and unimportant dissatisfactions.

No, but why is Croft that way? Oh there are The Answers. He is that way because of the-corruption-of-the-society. He is that way because he is having problems of adjustment. It is because he is a...

Red had a deep loathing of the night before them. He had been through so much combat, had felt so many kinds of terror, and had seen so many men killed that he no longer had any illusions about the...

You've seen too many movies. If you're holding a gun and you shoot a defenseless man, then you're a poor creature, a dastardly person. That's a perfectly ridiculous idea, you realize. The fact that...

Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are...

Yeah, fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap.