Ian > Books: re-read‎ (86)

“Some terrible perversion of human sexual destiny had begun; he [Charles] was no more than a footsoldier, a pawn in a far vaster battle; and like all battles it was not about love, but about possession and territory.”

"Life is like a guitar solo. It's loud, shapeless and it goes on too long. Sometimes it's tuneless, sometimes it's cliched, either way it's damned difficult to get it right, and even if you've done your best and you're pleased with what you've achieved, you can be sure a lot of people are going to hate it and dump all over you and tell you you're a loser."

"If she was tolerated at all it was as a kind of joke, an eccentric comedy act, but those who had known her at her best found it a sad, sick joke."

"You live in a different world...Your family has money, sailboats, the whole business. They don't want anything to change except taxation. Neither will you. You'll accept the status quo, adapt yourself to it, even exploit it. But you won't want to change anything. That's the difference between your world and the real world, where everything needs changing.

"I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about your situation. It's just different, that's all. It's small and selfish, and it's dying, but you don't know that, and it's not your fault. It's the way you were brought up. You were trained not to know, not to see."

"We wanted to believe that human beings would rise to the high principles of a cause, and they do, as long as the cause is not in power. But once in power, principles soon become political weapons, and they are abused."

"You're trying to do your own thinking, just as I did, Barney. The Party is not for you, do you hear?"

"...sealing her off from the outside world, making her feel disoriented, as if she were listening to the soundtrack of a video or film that did not correspond to the events (or, perhaps more accurately, non-events) unfolding around her, making her feel partially absent from this mass transit continuum that she is not meant to inhabit any longer than the time needed to pass through it, her senses thrown back upon themselves..." (4)

"...why has she been made to suffer so senselessly, so unfairly? Her husband puts his arms around her (the hard shape of the Walkman pressing against her) and, for a brief moment as they turn around to join the lane of exiting passengers, accidentally brushes his ears against hers, the sudden contact of his skin, so exquisitely warm and dry, sending her into a split second of delirium."

“Shorn of all human rights, man reverts back to the animal.”

“To stay alive it is first necessary to die a little.”

“I learned that there were only two kinds of patient: the sick, who always died, and the injured, who sometimes also got sick.”

“In this clinic death is the usual cure that is available to patients.”

"The first step...was to make Dickie like him. That he wanted more than anything else in the world."

"His stories were good because he imagined them intensely, so intensely that he came to believe them."