Vile Bodies

After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.

There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.

I can't bare you when you're not amusing.

I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.

Soon someone would say the fatal words, "Well, I think it’s time for me to go to bed.

It’s awful to think that I shall probably never, as long as I live, see you dancing like that again all by yourself.

Miss Runcible wore trousers and Miles touched up his eye-lashes in the dining-room of the hotel where they stopped for luncheon. So they were asked to leave.

Success in this world depends on knowing exactly how little effort each job is worth...distribution of energy...

Don't you think," said Father Rothschild gently, "that perhaps it is all in some way historical? I don't think people ever want to lose their faith either in religion or anything else. I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence. I think all these divorces show that. People aren't content just to muddle along nowadays ... And this word "bogus" they all use ... They won't make the best of a bad job nowadays. My private schoolmaster used to say, "If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well." My Church has taught that in different words for several centuries. But these young people have got hold of another end of the stick, and for all we know it may be the right one. They say, "If a thing's not worth doing well, it's not worth doing at all." It makes everything very difficult for them.

...that kernel of gaiety that never breaks.

(...Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John's Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris--all that succession and repetition of massed humanity.... Those vile bodies...)

Wars don’t start nowadays because people want them. We long for peace, and fill our newspapers with conferences about disarmament and arbitration, but there is a radical instability in our whole world order, and soon we shall all be walking into the jaws of destruction again, protesting our pacific intentions.

Books, eh?” he said. “And what sort of books, may I ask?” “Look for yourself.” “Thank you, that’s what I mean to do. Books, indeed.” Adam wearily unstrapped and unlocked his suitcase. “Yes,” said the Customs officer menacingly, as though his worst suspicions had been confirmed, “I should just about say you had got some books.” One by one he took the books out and piled them on the counter. A copy of Dante excited his especial disgust. “French, eh?” he said. “I guessed as much, and pretty dirty, too, I shouldn’t wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books”—how he said it!—“ in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can’t stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.

The effects of their drinks had now entered on that secondary stage, vividly described in temperance handbooks, when the momentary illusion of well-being and exhilaration gives place to melancholy, indigestion and moral decay.

discontented. And I did think at one time that perhaps Bob was thinking of Betty Rylands, you know Mrs. Rylands’ girl at the Laurels, such nice people, and they used to play tennis together and people remarked how much they were about, but now he never seems to pay any attention to her, it’s all his hockey friends, and I said one Saturday, ‘Wouldn’t you like to ask Betty over to tea?’ and he said, ‘Well, you can if you like,’ and she came looking ever so sweet, and, would you believe it, Bob went out and didn’t come in at all until suppertime. Well, you can’t expect any girl to put up with that, and now she’s practically engaged to that young Anderson boy who’s in the wireless business.

To Father Rothschild no passage was worse than any other. He thought of the sufferings of the saints, the mutability of human nature, the Four Last Things, and between whiles repeated snatches of the penitential psalms.