The Razor's Edge (Vintage classics)

by W. Somerset Maugham

For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they were born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives’ tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can’t come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them. You can only know them if you are them.

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.

The monks told me that God had created the world for his glorification. That didn’t seem to me a very worthy object. Did Beethoven create his symphonies for his glorification? I don’t believe it. I believe he created them because the music in his soul demanded expression and then all he tried to do was to make them as perfect as he knew how.

I wasn’t prepared to believe in an all-wise God who hadn’t common sense.

‘I think I can tell you. I’ve always felt that there was something pathetic in the founders of religion who made it a condition of salvation that you should believe in them. It’s as though they needed your faith to have faith in themselves.

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

‘Were you? What were you doing there?’ ‘Burying Sophie.’ ‘She’s not dead?’ cried Isabel. ‘If she hadn’t been we’d have had no plausible reason to bury her.’

‘We’ve had some good times together. ‘Keep a good recollection of me.’