The Razor's Edge

by W. Somerset Maugham

Death ends all things and so is the comprehensive conclusion of a story, but marriage finishes it very properly too and the sophisticated are ill-advised to sneer at what is by convention termed a happy ending. It is a sound instinct of the common people which persuades them that with this all that needs to be said is said. When male and female, after whatever vicissitudes you like, are at last brought together they have fulfilled their biological function and interest passes to the generation that is to come.

We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.

I think she summed them up shrewdly enough according to the standards of the small Virginian town where she was born and bred. I think she got a certain amount of amusement from observing their antics, and I don’t believe she took their airs and graces any more seriously than she took the aches and pains of the characters in a novel which she knew from the beginning (otherwise she wouldn’t have read it) would end happily.

much more often than he would have liked anyone to know he suffered the humiliation of dining by himself in the privacy of his suite. Women of rank in England, when a scandal has closed the doors of society to them, develop an interest in the arts and surround themselves with painters, writers, and musicians. Elliott was too proud thus to humiliate himself.

“God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.”

nothing is easier than to bear other people’s calamities with fortitude,

I remember one of them telling me of a Yogi who came to the bank of a river; he hadn’t the money to pay the ferryman to take him across and the ferryman refused to take him for nothing, so he stepped on the water and walked upon its surface to the other side. The Yogi who told me shrugged his shoulders rather scornfully. ‘A miracle like that,’ he said, ‘is worth no more than the penny it would have cost to go on the ferryboat.’

There was something eerie in the silence that fell upon us; it was like the silence of flowers in a garden at nightfall.

there’s a moment in spring—it hardly lasts more than a fortnight—when the dogwood bursts into flower, and the gum trees burst into leaf, and their young fresh green against the gray Spanish moss is like a song of joy; the ground is carpeted with great white lilies and wild azalea. Gray couldn’t say what it meant to him, but it meant the world. He was drunk with the loveliness of it. Oh, I know I don’t put it well, but I can’t tell you how moving it was to see that great hulk of a man uplifted by an emotion so pure and so beautiful that it made me want to cry. If there is a God in heaven Gray was very near Him then.”

But it was good advice I gave him, you know. I hope he took it, he wasn’t a bad fellow; only a bad artist.”

Don’t aim to be strong; be satisfied to charm. And be honest. In business sharp practice sometimes succeeds, but in art honesty is not only the best but the only policy.”

Of course you Anglo-Saxons are peculiar, you’re brutal and at the same time you’re sentimental; there’s no denying it, you’re not good lovers.

My instinct told me I’d be silly to fall in love with him, you know women are very unfortunate, so often when they fall in love they cease to be lovable, and I made up my mind to be on my guard.”

I thought I should be a fool to allow work to interfere with a delight in the passing moment that I might never enjoy again so fully.

It’s always difficult to make conversation with a drunk, and there’s no denying it, the sober are at a disadvantage with him.

She’d lived in heaven and when she lost it she couldn’t put up with the common earth of common men, but in despair plunged headlong into hell. I can imagine that if she couldn’t drink the nectar of the gods any more she thought she might as well drink bathroom gin.” “That’s the sort of thing you say in novels. It’s nonsense and you know it’s nonsense. Sophie wallows in the gutter because she likes it. Other women have lost their husbands and children. It wasn’t that that made her evil. Evil doesn’t spring from good. The evil was there always. When that motor accident broke her defenses it set her free to be herself. Don’t waste your pity on her; she’s now what at heart she always was.”

“I’ve left proper instructions in my will, but I want you to see they’re carried out. I will not be buried on the Riviera among a lot of retired colonels and middle-class French people.”

D’you think I sacrificed myself to let Larry fall into the hands of a raging nymphomaniac?” “How did you sacrifice yourself?” “I gave Larry up for the one and only reason that I didn’t want to stand in his way.” “Come off it, Isabel. You gave him up for a square-cut diamond and a sable coat.” The words were hardly out of my mouth when a plate of bread and butter came flying at my head.

“I only wanted to suggest to you that self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality.

I think he’s undertaking a hopeless job; with his acute sensibility he’ll suffer the tortures of the damned; his life’s work, whatever it may be, will remain undone. The ignoble Paris killed Achilles by shooting an arrow in his heel. Larry lacks just that touch of ruthlessness that even the saint must have to win his halo.”

“No stranger than that Luther Burbank who was born on a farm in Massachusetts should have produced a seedless orange or that Henry Ford who was born on a farm in Michigan should have invented a Tin Lizzie.” “But those are practical things. That’s in the American tradition.” I laughed. “Can anything in the world be more practical than to learn how to live to best advantage?”

“What are you thinking?” I asked her. “I don’t quite like the look of you.” “I’m sorry; I thought that was the one thing about me you did like.”

“Life’s hell anyway, but if there is any fun to be got out of it, you’re only a god-damn fool if you don’t get it.”

“Whenever I wake up in the night and hear a mouse scratching away in the wainscoat I say: “That’s Paul Barton climbing.”

She could not help saying beastly things about even her intimate friends, but she did this because she was a stupid woman and knew no other way to make herself interesting.

I was suddenly startled into intense consciousness by a hurried, angry sound, the most awe-inspiring sound anyone can hear, the death rattle. I went over to the bed and by the gleam of the lighthouse felt Elliott’s pulse. He was dead.

It made me sad to think how silly, useless, and trivial his life had been. It mattered very little now that he had gone to so many parties and had hobnobbed with all those princes, dukes, and counts. They had forgotten him already.

Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.

“You’ve had a great deal of success,” he went on. “Do you want to be praised to your face?” “It only embarrasses me.” “That’s what I should have thought. I couldn’t believe that God wanted it either.

I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart’s blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.

Isabel slipped her arm through Gray’s and, nestling up to him, looked into his eyes with an expression that imitated very well the tenderness I had accused her of lacking.

One of the less agreeable features of French life is that you are apt to be pressed to drink a glass of vinegary port at an unseasonable hour. You must resign yourself to it.

“Life would be even harder for us poor women than it is if it were not for the unbelievable vanity of men.”

Larry has been absorbed, as he wished, into that tumultuous conglomeration of humanity, distracted by so many conflicting interests, so lost in the world’s confusion, so wishful of good, so cocksure on the outside, so diffident within, so kind, so hard, so trustful, and so cagey, so mean and so generous, which is the people of the United States.