Status Updates From The Charioteer

Bloody Germans

"“Look after yourself.”
“Would you care?”
“You know.”
“Spud, I’d give anything to ease this up for you. Not just for my own
sake, though you think that.” [...]
“You only hurt yourself, you don’t know what it does to me. I’ve been
around more than you. If you’d only trust me.”
“You can’t eat and breathe for me, or live for me. No one can.”
“It kills me just to stand watching,” Ralph said. “It’s not the way I’m
made.”

"We sign the warrant for our own exile, he thought. Self-pity and alibis come after."

"The fair hair, which Laurie had seen for so long only in order and discipline, lay tumbled like a boy’s [...] he reached out stealthily and touched it. When he moved away, Ralph’s eyes had opened. They were smiling, and with fear Laurie saw in how deep a happiness, too silent and too deep, eating like rust the core of his defenses. From some great distance, thin and archaic and perilous, the first cockcrow sounded."

"Outside, in the bleaching lye of the moonlight, washed of their distracting colors, the shapes of things burned in archetypal truth. Laurie stood casting his long shadow on the room behind him, silent in a grief and wonder too deep for tears, that life was so divided and irreconcilable [...] He felt that his body had grown bitterly cold, and wondered how he had ignored its protests for so long."

"Stealthily the cold silent night slid around Laurie its noose of solitude. But it was only he who was alone. Ralph lay quiet with the image he had created, the beloved and desired, for whom nothing was good enough, of whom nothing was demanded but to trust and receive."

"The moon would linger, a pale spent wafer, in the blue morning sky."

(cont. II)
"At the far end of the buffet, one of the decrepit waiters had appeared. Laurie’s gaze travelled out from Ralph’s face to meet a cold, flat, withdrawing eye, glaucous and sunken, the eye of yesterday’s fish rejected by this morning’s buyers, wrinkling on the slab. The face could still be read, as it were, between the lines; faint traces were left in it of a mincing, petulant kind of good looks."

“Tell me if you want to rest and I’ll fix it.”
“There’s nothing you can’t fix, is there?”
“It’s time someone started to look after you.”
“Is it?” He felt subtle and rarefied. He looked up.
“Spud,” said Ralph softly, “you’re drunk. Be careful.”
They held one another’s eyes for a moment, not having meant to. (cont.)

"He signed the register and kissed his mother. As if she were covered with an impalpable veil, he could feel only that he was kissing a bride. He saw Mr. Straike advancing and wondered for one dislocated minute whether he would expect to be kissed too."

"Canon Rosslow had what is slanderously called the Oxford accent. He made the Homily sound like a piece of respectable cant."

"“For God’s sake,” said Laurie, even now remembering not to raise his voice, “don’t stand there like St. Sebastian full of arrows, thinking of nothing but your own bloody principles. When you care about people you can’t always be so choosy. Go outside, then, and keep yourself clean. I’ll manage here. Charlot and I understand each other.”

"The strict room was wearing a half-smile of hospitality; there was a cloth on the table, and a plate of sandwiches bought ready cut and sealed in wax paper. There was something very comforting to Laurie in the matter-of fact way Ralph made no bones about having expected him. There was a feeling of being looked after, a feeling almost of home."

"Anyway, here we are, heaven knows how many thousand of us, since there’s never been a census. I’m not prepared to accept a standard which puts the whole of my emotional life on the plane of immorality."

"Bunny threw open a glittering cocktail cabinet lined with looking glass;
this seemed to be an automatic gesture like switching on the radio, which he did at the same time. Talking brightly against it, he went to a cupboard and got out a red-and-black tea set. Ralph walked over to the radio and, without permission or apology, switched it off. “Oh, you,” said Bunny coquettishly."

"That day the first breath of winter had reached the shrinking flesh of a continent at war."

leaving it there at 11:13pm tonight, boys. gonna have to rally to finish the rest of it tmrw (244 pages left, AHHHHHHH).

"“Good for her,” said Laurie, cutting him off short. Where did he think he was, exposing this naked happiness and trust? It was time he learned to be decent. Andrew’s face changed. One day Laurie had been swishing a stick about, and caught his dog a cracking blow by accident; he had looked incredulous and bewildered, just like this."

"“Good for her,” said Laurie, cutting him off short. Where did he think he was, exposing this naked happiness and trust? It was time he learned to be decent."

"“Well, perhaps that’s rather a stagy way of putting it. He commanded the ship that brought me back from Dunkirk, that’s all.” [...] One might almost as well, thought Laurie, have said it aloud. Because he did for me what you wouldn’t do, I’m alive to be with you now. Here at last, stripped of the secondary things, of motive and praise and blame, were the bare bones of logic, grinning in the sun."

“There was a man at Oxford. It was all rather silly. He looked a bit like
one of the less forceful portraits of Byron. It wasn’t so much he himself
who attracted me, though up to a point he did. There are always certain
people at Oxford who seem to hold a key. I didn’t know what I expected
he’d let me into, Newstead Abbey by moonlight or something."

"They had identified themselves with their limitations; they were making a career of them. They had turned from all other reality, and curled up in them snugly, as in a womb."

"Alec paused [...] concentrating like a child with shut eyes, before he blew. Watching, Laurie was aware of some inward change in the group [...] a hopefulness, a wistfulness; they looked at the little ritual as though it were an affirmation of something doubtfully promised, or insecurely held, a symbol of stability [...] He thought of the white toy cupboard, the window bars, the place for the gate on the stairs."

"Ralph smiled at him. It was an odd smile, with a practiced charm which it was impossible to mistake, and yet with something curiously vulnerable and defensive in it. Laurie felt an inexplicable urgency to be kind, for which he could find no expression."