indie’s Reviews > The Charioteer > Status Update

"“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."

"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.”