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do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn’t had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn’t love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.
a man was surely entitled to that much revenge. Revenge was good for the character: out of revenge grew forgiveness.
life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old death-bed?
The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being—it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and ties are worth a thousand truths.
he dreamed of peace by day and night. Once in sleep it had appeared to him as the great glowing shoulder of the moon heaving across his window like an iceberg, Arctic and destructive in the moment before the world was struck: by day he tried to win a few moments of its company,
Peace seemed to him the most beautiful word in the language: My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you: O Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace.
Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin,
along.’ It was day now outside, and there was a peculiar innocence about the light, gentle and clear and fresh before the sun climbed.
‘friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.
“Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.”’ ‘It sounds a very bad poem to me.
happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness
but that the child should have been allowed to survive the forty days and nights in the open boat—that was the mystery, to reconcile that with the love of God. And yet he could believe in no God who was not human enough to love what he had created. ‘How on earth did she survive till now?’ he wondered aloud.
What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery. He had cut down his own needs to a minimum, photographs were put away in drawers, the dead were put out of mind: a razor-strop, a pair of rusty handcuffs for decoration. But one still has one’s eyes, he thought, one’s ears. Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, evil—or else an absolute ignorance. Outside
It seemed after all that one never really missed a thing. To be a human being one had to drink the cup. If one were lucky on one day, or cowardly on another, it was presented on a third occasion.
What they had both thought was safety proved to have been the camouflage of an enemy who works in terms of friendship, trust and pity.
They were very generous in Northampton. I only had to ask and they’d give. I wasn’t of any use to a single living soul, Scobie. I thought, in Africa things will be different. You see I’m not a reading man, Scobie. I never had much talent for loving God as some people do. I wanted to be of use, that’s all.
God can wait, he thought: how can one love God at the expense of one of his creatures?
our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.
better surely to pretend a belief than wander in that vicious vacuum of cruelty and despair.
‘You can look after yourself. You survive the cross every day. You can only suffer. You can never be lost. Admit that you must come second to these others.’
It isn’t beauty that we love, he thought, it’s failure—the failure to stay young for ever, the failure of nerves, the failure of the body. Beauty is like success: we can’t love it for long.
