Under The Net Quotes
"Trains are bad for the nerves at the best of times. What did people have nightmares about before there were trains?"
"When we are short of beds it is always Finn who sleeps on the floor, and this seems thoroughly natural."
"Subtle people, like myself, can see too much ever to give a straight answer."
"There's nothing like being ousted for making one start to specify what it is one is being ousted from."
"But communion of souls was Anna's special subject."
"It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself."
"Love is action, it is silence. It's not the emotional straining and scheming for possession."
"Only very simple things can be said without falsehood."
"I am thinking perhaps about God, freedom, and immortality."
"I'm tied up for days and days. Someone's even coming to fetch me away from this place."
"I couldn't bring myself, in front of such an audience, to put the matter less delicately."
"My dear boy, don't speak of letting. I want a caretaker, in fact I want a bodyguard."
"You'll be most enormously useful if you can just be around the place a little."
"You won't start being afraid of me, I suppose?"
"I didn't imagine Sadie had any close knowledge of Anna's doings."
"The evening was by now well advanced. The darkness hung in the air but spread out in a suspended powder which only made the vanishing colours more vivid."
"The zenith was a strong blue, the horizon a radiant amethyst."
"In between the willow herb waved over what remained of streets."
"Yellow light from swinging lamps in alleyways fell upon the white walls, revealing ancient names, and darkened the upper air towards night."
"The declining sun struck on glowing bricks and flashing tiles and warmed the stone of an occasional fallen pillar."
"We noticed a few stars which looked as if they had been there a long time."
"This was just the sort of pub Hugo liked; but he was not therein."
"His exhausted anaemic look contrasted with the vigour and abruptness of his speech."
"That you are a talented man who is too lazy to work."
"It's the whole framework that's at stake. What's the use of preventing a man from stumbling when he's on a sinking ship?"
"Because if he breaks his ankle he won't be able to swim."
"You don't really believe in Socialist Possibility. You're a mechanist."
"The rest of the night appears in patches through the haze that hangs over it in my memory."
"Violent hands had been laid upon the house; it had been violated."
"I was stooping to disentangle my foot from a glass necklace, when something caught my eye upon the neck of the rocking-horse."
"The way I felt at that moment I could have walked up the side of the Queen Mary."
"I sat on a bench at Hyde Park Corner rubbing my head, and trying to make a plan."
"I must try to get back my typescript at once."
"The porter went ahead of us and put his hand on the door. 'Not so fast I said,' he said."
"My heart was beating out the refrain too late."
"With its rumbling still in my ears I walked into Hyde Park, fell flat upon the grass, and almost immediately fell asleep."
"Nothing in the world was more important than money. Why had I not understood this before?"
"I must live my own life. And it simply doesn't lie in this direction."
"The twisting hills of falsehood never cease to appal me, but I constantly enter them."
"I might tell you that I cared for you too much to be willing to stand by while you go to bed with the men who can help you to become a star."
"It was as nothing to me. In the light of that vision it shrivelled like autumn leaves, its gold turning to brown and crumbling away into dust."
"There is a path which awaited me and which if I failed to take it would lie untrodden forever."
"I felt a mingled rage and distress which drove every other idea from my mind."
"If Anna were in Paris, what would she be doing? She might be with somebody."
"There is something compelling about the sound of a fountain in a deserted place. It murmurs about what things do when no one watches them."
"I waited a long time, but Anna did not come."
"Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair."
"But my need of Anna had not lost its sharpness."
"The spectacle of their ill success which, together with my own temperament, had chiefly deterred me from any essays in this direction."
"If he can he will pry under your eyelids and prise them apart."
"I was feeling impressed, at the point which our story had now reached, and not only by my having got the job, but also by the efficient way in which I turned out to be able to perform it."
"I did, however, dislike the dim light, and on the second day provided, at my own expense, a more powerful electric light bulb."
"Every man must have a trade. Yours is writing. Mine will be making and mending watches, I hope, if I'm good enough."
"God is a task. God is detail. It all lies close to your hand."
"What more do you want? God is a task. God is detail. It all lies close to your hand."
"All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing."
"So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face."
"Something had changed; it would be time enough later on to decide what it was."
"Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing."
"I was full of that strength which is better than happiness, better than the weak wish for happiness which women can awaken in a man to rot his fibres."
"It was the first day of the world. I was full of that strength which is better than happiness."
"Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute."