Carol

“Here were the Arabs believing me, Allenby and Clayton trusting me, my bodyguard dying for me: and I began to wonder if all established reputations were founded, like mine, on fraud.”
― T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

“IN HIS HOURS OF GLOOM—and they were frequent—Thomas Buddenbrook would ask himself what sort of man he really was and what could still justify his seeing himself as something better than any of his simplehearted, plodding, and small-minded fellow citizens. The imaginative élan and cheerful idealism of youth were gone. To play at work, to work at play, to strive, to direct one’s half-serious, half-whimsical ambition toward goals to which one ascribes only symbolic value—that requires a great deal of vigor,”
― Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

“afoot. I had had no concern with the Arab Revolt in the beginning. In the end I was responsible for its being an embarrassment to the inventors. Where exactly in the interim my guilt passed from accessory to principal, upon what headings I should be condemned, were not for me”
― T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

“left alone. The camel-ticks, which had drunk themselves (with blood from our tethered camels) into tight slaty-blue cushions, thumbnail wide, and thick, used to creep under us, hugging the leathern underside of the sheepskins: and if we rolled on them in the night, our weight burst them to brown mats of blood and dust.”
― T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom