Barbara Vine Quotes

By the age I was then I ought to know the truism that things always look different in the morning. As the night comes on and the deeper it gets, the more mad we are, the more prone to dreadful fears and fantasies. In the morning, not when we first wake up but gradually, things begin to look unlike what they looked like at eleven, at midnight.

Is there any sadder sight than a burnt out library?

Lewis would have agreed with Oscar Wilde that our past is what we are. We cannot rid ourselves of it.

Empty minds are abhorred by thought as vacuums are by nature.

Without me, without me,
Everyday's misery.
But with me - am I wrong?
No night is too long!

Games were being played, that was all, and games of which he was largely ignorant and wished to remain so.

The safest way to live is first, inherit money, second be born without a taste for liquor, third, have a legitimate job that keeps you busy, fourth, marry a wife who will cooperate in your sexual peculiarities, fifth, join some big church, sixth, don't live too long.

Mark Twain had written somewhere: We are all mad at night.

I think life's too long to do anything that we know is wrong before we begin.

Isak Dinesen said that life is no more than a process for turning healthy young puppies into mangy old dogs and man but an exquisite instrument for converting the red wine of Shiraz into urine.

Time, the best of all doctors, though it kills you in the end, had done more than therapy could.

Why do you always wear black?"
She delighted me with her answer, the correct, the only, answer. "I'm in mourning for my life. I'm unhappy.

Those who have inside their lives an empty space need to fill it with love if they can, and if they cannot, with things. And they need to please others in order that others may give them love. Those who need love with the hunger the rest of mankind keeps for food, for the necessaries of life, give their bodies simply and without reflection for a return of love, would give their soul if they knew how, are reduced to thievery of the basest kind and of the basest things because this is the easiest way.

Events in his own past he never thought of as evil but rather as mistaken, immensely regrettable, brought about by fear and greed.

Ivo had grown more and more like one of those characters in his books who are always groaning about their miserable fate in helplessly loving someone unworthy of their love. Maugham never says much about what that's like for the poor old unworthy object. I could have told him. It's not exactly uplifting for the self-image.

You do not put off things because they threaten you, because you are afraid; It was a rule of life.

The wonderful thing about the human mind is the way it copes when the worst happens. Beyond that worst happening you think there can be nothing, the unimaginable has taken place, and on the other side is death, destruction, the end. But the worst happens and you reel from it, you stagger, the shock is enormous, and then you begin to recover. You rally, you stand up and face it. You get used to it.
For what had happen was not the worst, you realize that. the worst was yet to come, was perhaps always yet to come, never would actually come, because if it did, you would know it, that would be reality, and there would be nothing then but to kill yourself. Quickly.