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Over the whole landscape lay a luminous and unnatural discoloration, as of that disastrous twilight which Milton spoke of as shed by the sun in eclipse; so that Syme fell easily into his first thought, that he was actually on some other and emptier planet, which circled around some sadder star.

Philip Larkin: Sexual intercourse began in 1963, / Between the end of the Chatterley / ban and the Beatles' first LP.

The Soviets too would pay a price for this [Hungarian attack]—in many ways, 1956 represented the defeat and collapse of the revolutionary myth so successfully cultivated by Lenin and his heirs. As Boris Yeltsin was to acknowledge many years later, in a speech to the Hungarian Parliament on November 11th 1992, 'The tragedy of 1956 ... will forever remain an indelible spot on the Soviet regime.'

You know the pain is part of the whole thing. And it isn't that you could say afterwards the pleasure was greater than the pain and that's why you would do it again. That has nothing to do with it. You can't measure it, because the pain comes after and it lasts longer.

[I]t was one of the oddities of post-war West Germany that their country's privileged position as a de facto American protectorate was for some of its citizens as much a source of resentment as of security. And such sentiments were only strengthened when it became clear ... that a war in Germany might see the use of battlefield nuclear weapons—under the exclusive control of others.

Cyril Connolly: Morally and economically Europe has lost the war. The great marquee of European civilization in whose yellow light we all grew up, and read, or wrote, or loved, or traveled has fallen down; the side ropes are frayed, the centre pole is broken, the chairs and tables are all in pieces, the tent is empty, the roses are withered on their stands ....

Footnote: The Bulgarians had actually oscillated quite markedly over the years from enthusiastic pro-Germanism to ultra-Slavophilism. Neither served them well. As a local commentator remarked at the time, Bulgaria always chooses the wrong card ... and SLAMS it on the table!

The inflation in neighboring Hungary, the worst in recorded history and far exceeding that of 1923 Germany, peaked at 5 quintillion [5 to the 30th power] paper pengos to the dollar—meaning that by the time the pengo was replaced by the forint in August 1946 the dollar value of all Hungarian banknotes in circulation was just one-thousandth of one cent.

And in New Orleans those days you couldn't get away from talk of the sniper. Wherever you went, whoever was talking, that was the subject. Like weather, it was everywhere.

Mike nodded. A somber nod. The nod Napoleon might have given if somebody had met him in 1812, and said, "So you're back from Moscow, eh?"

The action of the years which had transformed all the individuals I had seen today, including Gilberte herself, had certainly turned all those who still survived, as they would have done Albertine if she had not been killed, into women very different from my recollections of them. It was painful for me to have to retrieve these for myself, for time, which changes individuals, does not modify the image we have of them

My grandmother, whom I had with so much indifference watched as she suffered her last moments and died before my eyes! Oh, that I might, in expiation, when my work is finished, fatally injured, suffer for long hours, abandoned by everybody, before finally dying!

Attachment to an object always brings death to its owner.

The war seemed to be continuing indefinitely, and those who had already announced several years earlier, from a reliable source, that peace negotiations had started, and even specified the clauses of the treaty, no longer bothered when they talked to you to apologize for their false reports. They had forgotten them completely, and were ready to spread new stories with equal insincerity....

It was this that gave her the blood-red mouth which she tried to keep curved in a permanent smile, in the belief that it suited her, while the approaching arrival time of the train, which Gilberte still not knowing whether her husband would actually be on it or whether he would send one of those telegrams which M de Guermantes had wittily characterized as: UNABLE TO COME: LIE FOLLOWS, made her cheeks grow pale...

The beginning of freedom, she had said. But would any of them survive the kind of freedom that was in the air, the kind that he was trying to support? Fortunately, he was too tired to wonder whether he was building a cathedral of freedom, or merely digging his own grave.

What had he actually believed in then? That you must not live without purpose, that you must look to the consequences of your actions, live in a way that brings harm or pain to no one. And you must leave some trace of yourself behind, and that trace would be a work of art,

What had he actually believed in then? That you must not live without purpose, that you must look to the consequences of your actions, live in a way that brings harm or pain to no one. And you must leave some trace of yourself behind, and that trace would be a work of art,

He'd done all this to her, one man. It wasn't enough that he'd done it once, he'd done it twice now. He'd wrecked two lives for her. He'd smashed up the poor inoffensive seventeen-year-old simpleton from San Francisco who had had the bad luck to stray his way. Smashed her up, and wiped his feet over her five-and-ten-cent-store dreams, and spit on them.

Sometimes there is a dividing-line running across life. Sharp, almost actual, like the black stroke of a paintbrush or the white gash of a chalk mark. Sometimes, but not often.

... with the prince demurring that it was not a sanctuary that he sought but a means of getting away to the mainland and a ship to take him to France. He had had a sufficiency of lurking and hiding in secret places.

We go. Or, I go. Whence I came. We dare not wait longer here. Every day, every hour, ma foi, endangers us, endangers all. That I will not have. You all, and so many others, endangered further. There has been a sufficiency of hurt, to over many. I go to France, God willing, to return hereafter.

When [Keir Hardie] took his seat in the House wearing tweeds and a cloth cap, ...it was as if a red flag had been raised at Westminster.... During a debate on the unemployed he sat listening in growing rage while no word for the starving was uttered and finally burst out, "You well-fed beasts!"

Architecturally, Berlin, Europe's third largest city, was new and not beautiful. It belonged in style to what in America was called the Gilded Age. Its main public buildings, streets and squares, built or rebuilt since 1870 to house suitably the new national grandeur, were heavily pretentious and florid with gilding.

Fear as well as faith impelled the peace movement, fear of the unchained energy of the machine age. The great surge in mechanical energy, the amazing new techniques and tools and new inventions following one upon another, the fantastic capabilities of electricity, created an uneasy sense that man had gathered into his hands more power than he could control....

[Charles Eliot] Norton felt the bitterness of a man who discovers his beloved to be not as beautiful—nor as pure—as he had believed. "I fear that America ... is beginning a long course of error and wrong and is likely to become more and more a power for disturbance and barbarism...."

The curtain has one corner folded over and Santiago can see a chunk of almost dark sky, and imagine, outside, up above, falling down onto the houses and their elves, Miraflores, Lima, the same miserable drizzle as always.

No single individual was the hero of the [anarchist] movement that swallowed up these lives. The Idea was its hero. It was, as a historian of revolt has called it, 'a daydream of desperate romntics.' It had its theorists and thinkers, men of intellect, sincere and earnest, who loved humanity. It also had its tools....

If that martinet of a Chief Commissioner could see Maigret now, he would probably have accused him of doing a job unworthy of a superintendent.

And yet that was how the Superintendent had succeeded with most of his investigations: climbing stairs, sniffing in the corners, having a chat here and there, asking apparently futile questions, often spending hours in shady bistros.