HC: You think I shall be different tomorrow? {about suicide}...
But then again... perhaps the whole human race is cursed, and I'm simply in the lower echelon and therefore lose everything first.
There was nothing to charm or tempt me. Everything was old, withered, grey, limp and spent, and stank of staleness and decay. Dear God, how was it possible? How had I, with the wings of youth and...
The driver, a black silhouette upon his box, whipped up his bony horses. Icy silence in the coach. Marius, motionless, his body braced in the corner of the carriage, his head dropping down upon his...
Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. the...
For those who have dwelt in depression's dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell's black...
Shall I run back into the desert ... and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven't had enough...
Real terror is a crippling experience. You sweat so much that your skin goes all wrinkly like when you've been in the bath all afternoon. And then the scent of your sweat changes. It smells like cat...
Think it over carefully. This is very important," I say, "because to believe something, whatever it might be, is the doing of the mind. Do you follow? When you say you believe, you allow the...
Defeat I can endure with cheerfulness, my lady. But betrayal is like taking the wind from my sails, or the earth from beneath my feet. It chills my spirits like a rainy day, and all I can do is draw...
It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague...
You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.
How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to...
The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they...
What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you...
Read me back the last line. 'Read me back the last line,' read back the corporal who could take...
Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great....
Inscribed on the back was a line from Virgil in Latin: Audentes fortuna juvat. Fortune favors the...
The rain was pattering hypnotically on the plane's exterior.
He wondered often how he would ever recognize the first chill, flush, twinge, ache, belch, sneeze,...
Havermeyer was a lead bombardier who never missed. Yossarian was a lead bombardier who had been...
It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?