Aňa’s Reviews > The Liar > Status Update

Priests and psychotherapists may believe that the confessional-box or the analysis session reveals truths, but you know and I know and every human being knows that we lie all the time to all the world. Lying is as much a part of us as wearing clothes.

'He's your enemy, Donald!'
He most certainly is not,' said Trefusis. "Not unless! say so. He may dearly want to be my enemy, he may beg on bended knee for open hostility of the most violent kind, but it takes two to tangle. I choose my own enemies.'

(…) it satisfied a vague agoraphobia, or at least claustraphilia, that he would never admit to.

(…) depressed him deeply. Depressed him because he caught himself failing to react properly to it. There had been a time when that blend of natural and human perfection would have caused him to writhe with pleasure. But now human affairs and the responsibilities of friendship had claimed that part of him that was capable of feeling and there was nothing left over for nature or the abstract.

(…) the absurd beauty of the place depressed him deeply.

The House did its best to forget the whole embarrassment. Trotter was thought of with the kind of contempt and revulsion young Englishmen of the right type reserve for the sick, the mad, the poor and the old.

He didn’t know how to react. He didn’t know the form. He supposed that he owed Trotter something. The object of love should feel honoured or flattered, responsible in some way. Instead he felt insulted, degraded and revolted. More than that, he felt put upon.

Do I really have a place here? Adrian wondered. All this work? This sweat? No short cuts, no cheating, no copying out, no grafting? Of course I do. A physicist doesn’t work any harder than I do. He just copies out God’s ideas. And he usually gets them wrong.

Books and books and books. And then, just when an observer might be lured into thinking that that must be it, more books.
Barely a square inch of wood or wall or floor was visible. Walking was only allowed by pathways cut between the piles of books. Treading these pathways with books waist-high either side was like negotiating a maze. (…) Areas where seating was possible were like lagoons in a coral strand of books

English boarding schools have much to recommend them. If boys are going to be adolescent, and science has failed to come up with a way of stopping them, then much better to herd them together and let them get on with it in private.