The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.

The hospital is the antechamber to the tomb

The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.

The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity.

Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.