Jesteśmy społecznością, która kocha książki

Jestem książką, którą musisz przeczytać. Książka sama ci się nie przeczyta. Ona nawet nie wie, o czym jest. I ja nie wiem, o czym jestem...

Ktoś musi ci zadać pytanie(...) żebyś mógł na nie odpowiedzieć. Ale rzadko zdarza się spotkać człowieka, który by umiał zadawać właściwe pytania. Na ogół ludzie nie są aż tak ciekawi odpowiedzi...

Czy kobiety nigdy nie zaprzestaną prób? Nie. Ale też, ponieważ nie przestają, nauczyły się przegrywać.

To, co wiem, równa się temu czym jestem. A tego nie mogę Ci powiedzieć. Sam się musisz w tym zorientować. Jestem książką, którą musisz przeczytać. Książka sam się nie przeczyta, ona nawet sama nie wie, o czym jest. I ja nie wiem, czym jestem. Ty mógłbyś wiedzieć kim i czym jestem. Mógłbyś gdybyś chciał, jeśli Ci zależy.

W istocie liczy się nie tyle przedmiot rozmowy, ile fakt, że w danych okolicznościach jest się z kimś razem.

(...) jak można udawać zainteresowanie jakąś powieścią i nawet przez chwilę nie zastanowić się, co znaczy jej tytuł.

"Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination

- Dzień dobry! (Jest w tym coś religijnego, jak odpowiedzi w liturgii - potwierdzenie wiary w podstawowy dogmat amerykański, że dzień jest zawsze dobry. Dobry, pomimo Rosjan i ich rakiet, pomimo chorób i dolegliwości ciała. Bo przecież wiemy, że ani dolegliwości, ani Rosjanie nie są rzeczywiście rzeczywiści, prawda? Można przestać o nich myśleć, skazując ich na niebyt. I w ten sposób dzień znów będzie dobry. Więc bardzo dobrze, już jest dobry.)

Słowo miłość tak się zdewaluowało, że nie warte jest nawet pocałunku dziwki

If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.

The past is just something that's over.

But n o w isn't simply now. N o w is also a cold reminder; one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every n o w is labelled with a date, rendering all past n o w s obsolete, until - later or sooner - perhaps - no, not perhaps - quite certainly: It will come.

Są pewne rzeczy, co do których nawet nie wiesz, że je znasz, dopóki ktoś się ciebie o to nie spyta.

The Christopher who sat in that taxi is, practically speaking, dead; he only remains reflected in the fading memories of us who knew him. I can't revitalize him now. I can only reconstruct him from his remembered acts and words and from the writings he has left us. He embarrasses me often, and so I'm tempted to sneer at him; but I will try not to. I'll try not to apologize for him, either. After all, I owe him some respect. In a sense he is my Father, and in another sense my Son.

As a very young man, Christopher had read Turgenev and Chekhov and had yearned romantically for the steppe, the immense land- ocean which stretches east, unbounded, to the Ural Mountains and then endlessly on across Siberia. At Mohrin, he was actually on the edge of that ocean. But the ocean seemed less inspiring, here, than it had seemed in London, ten years earlier. God, it was flat.

Towary różnych marek w błyszczących opakowaniach, na każdy miałoby się apetyt. I każdy towar na półkach woła do ciebie: "Weź mnie! Weź mnie!"; sama ilość tych wezwań napawa cię poczuciem, że jesteś pożądany, może nawet kochany. Ale strzeż się - kiedy wrócisz do swego pustego pokoju, okaże się, że nabrał cię pochlebczy duszek reklamy: masz tylko tekturę, celofan i żywność. I przechodzi ci nawet ochota na jedzenie.

Naziści potrafią pisać nieudolnie jak dzieci z pierwszej klasy, ale są zdolni do wszystkiego. Dlatego bywają tacy niebezpieczni.

But your book is wrong, Mrs. Strunk, says George, when it tells you that Jim is the substitute I found for a real son, a real kid brother, a real husband, a real wife. Jim wasn't a substitute for anything. And there is no substitute for Jim, if you'll forgive my saying so, anywhere.

Każde teraz jest opatrzone nalepką z datą, unieważnia wszelkie poprzednie teraz do czasu, gdy prędzej czy później, może, nie może z całą pewnością i ono przeminie.

Zwierzęta potrafią zmieniać się w demony i owładnąć życiem człowieka.

Czy może czuć się naprawdę samotny ktoś, kto nigdy nie jadł sam?

No to przepraszam... nic na to nie poradzę!

But to say, I won’t eat alone tonight; isn’t that deadly dangerous? Isn’t it the start of a long landslide – from eating at counters and drinking at bars to drinking at home without eating, to despair and sleeping pills and the inevitable overdose? But who says I have to be brave?

Christopher wanted to keep Bubi all to himself for ever, to possess him utterly, and he knew that this was impossible and absurd. If he had been a savage, he might have solved the problem by eating Bubi - for magical, not gastronomic reasons.

He knew only one pair of homosexual lovers who declared proudly that they were Nazis. Misled by their own erotic vision of a New Sparta, they fondly supposed that Germany was entering an era of military man-love, with all women excluded. They were aware, of course, that Christopher thought them crazy, but they dismissed him with a shrug. How could he understand? This wasn't his homeland... No, indeed it wasn't. Christopher had realized that for some time, already. But this tragic pair of self-deceivers didn't realize - and wouldn't, until it was too late - that this wasn't their homeland, either.

Despair is something horribly simple. And though Mr. Lancaster had been so fond of talking about it, he probably found it absolutely unlike anything he had ever imagined. But, in his case, I hope and believe, it was short-lived. Few of us can bear much pain of this kind and remain conscious. Most of the time, thank goodness, we suffer quite stupidly and unreflectingly, like the animals.

Down There" refers to that nether world within the individual which is the place of loneliness, alienation and hatred. This novel in four episodes describes characters shut up inside private hells of their own making, self-dedicated to a lifelong feud with The Others. The Author laughs at and with them often - for even hell can be funny - but he is forced to realize that his visits to them are, at the same time, visits to the "Down There" inside himself.

From time to time, Hans and Waldemar sang - those German songs which have a haunting sad-sweetness even when they are most pornographic.

All I could say was: he had the wrong kind of body. What was wrong with it? You couldn't say it wasn't goodlooking, lying there in the sunshine, very dark brown and gleaming with oil. And yet it repelled me slightly; it was slender in the wrong way, and somehow too elegant, too wearily sophisticated in its movements - though not to the point of seeming effeminate. Perhaps it had lain too long in the expensive Riviera or Bahamian sun, on the terraces of overweening hotels and villas perched like eagles above the sea; had belonged and yet not belonged to too many people; had been too often valued only for the envy it caused in the hearts of non-possessors. Perhaps it had lost its unself-conscious animal grace in the process of acquiring the negligent-arrogant art of being looked at.

I've never ever made up my mind to kill myself before; I've scarcely even considered it. Because I think it's a madly tiresome thing to do, and the only possible excuse for making such a nuisance of yourself is to wait until you're quite, quite certain you want to. Then you're pretty sure to do it properly. Until yesterday evening, there was always something left to stop me from being certain - some tiny little thing, like feeling curious about a movie we were going to see, or about what I'd eat for dinner, or just what was going to happen next. Well, yesterday, I suddenly found I'd come to the end of all that.