Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.
If it could only be like this always - always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper.
I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.
You spend the first term at Oxford meeting interesting and exciting people and the rest of your time there avoiding them
The most futile and disastrous day seems well spent when it is reviewed through the blue, fragrant smoke of a Havana Cigar.
Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.
I never can understand how two men can write a book together; to me that's like three people getting together to have a baby.
Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.
I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.
The only thing that it is advisable to know in any language is the numerals; and even there, you can do a lot with the fingers.
You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.
I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits.
There is an Easter sense in which all things are made new in the risen Christ. A tiny gleam of this is reflected in all true art.
The tour bus was supposed to be here ten minutes ago. Would it be possible to give them a ring to check they've not forgotten us?
'I don't believe you've changed at all, Charles.' 'No, I'm afraid not.' 'D'you want to change?' 'It's the only evidence of life.'
There is practically no sense that is not violated every time we return from the country or the sea to Paris or London or New York.
It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in 'Old Maid'; the player who is finally left with it has lost.
One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page.
News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.
Here I am,' I thought, 'back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.
My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.
The splendid thing about education is that everyone wants it. Like influenza, you can give it away without losing any of it yourself.
Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher
It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.
The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.
I am suing Lord Beaverbrook for libel and hope for some lovely tax-free money in damages. He has very conveniently told some lies about me.
How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation.
Remember that, however patient your study, you will never in adult life learn any language perfectly; the best you can hope for is to be a bore.
I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason that he is anxious to conceal.
Beavers bred in captivity, inhabiting a concrete pool, will, if given the timber, fatuously go through all the motions of damming an ancestral stream.
If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.
Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.
Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.
To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.
The audiences certainly have declined. If I go to the theatre now I find people come there to eat and smoke and talk to one another. And look like scarecrows.
There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.
The worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him. Julia to Charles
MGM bores me when I see them, but I don't see them much. They have been a help in getting me introductions to morticians, who are the only people worth knowing.
Have you at any time been detained in a mental home or similar institution? If so, give particulars.' 'I was at Scone College, Oxford, for two years,' said Paul.
Its theme-- the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters-- was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it.
I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets; I shall live long.
It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door.
The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.
I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.
Beer commercials are so patriotic: Made the American Way. What does that have to do with America? Is that what America stands for? Feeling sluggish and urinating frequently?
Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.
Of the many smells of Athens two seem to me the most characteristic - that of garlic, bold and deadly like acetylene gas. and that of dust, soft and warm and caressing like tweed.
Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you understand.' 'I don't want to make it easier for you,' I said; 'I hope your heart may break; but I do understand.
When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.