You stand watch and listen to every sound. Like a lynx. Wary of every rustle…In war they say you’re half man and half beast. It’s true. There’s no other way to survive. If you’re just a human being—you won’t stay whole.


“She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time—the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved. If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events, there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation—one or other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision, a spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action, we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity.”
― A Passage to India
― A Passage to India

“All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.”
― We Have Always Lived in the Castle
― We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.”
― Brideshead Revisited
― Brideshead Revisited

“You do care a little for me, I know... but nothing to speak of, and you don't love me. I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now... and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness.”
― Maurice
― Maurice

“There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.”
― Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
― Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
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