There is no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles.
We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
A man was like a child with his appetites. A woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would probably turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a very pleasant connection.
The bitch-goddess, as she is called, of Success, roamed, snarling and protective, round the half-humble, half-defiant Michaelis' heels, and intimidated Clifford completely: for he wanted to prostitute himself to the bitch-goddess Success also, if only she would have him.
Money is a sort of instinct. It's a sort of property of nature in a man to make money. It's nothing you do. It's no trick you play. It's a sort of permanent accident of your own nature; once you start, you make money, and you go on ... But you've got to begin ... You've got to get in. You can do nothing if you are kept outside. You've got to beat your way in. Once you've done that, you can't help it!
The bitch-goddess, Success, was trailed by thousands of gasping dogs with lolling tongues.
The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the sea ... maybe ... but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.
Sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them.
When the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the reassumed habit. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche.
The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.
Money is the seal and stamp of success.
Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness!
Happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people.
Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.
What a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!
A woman needn't be dragged down by her functions.
Conscience was chiefly fear of society, or fear of oneself.
When passion is dead, or absent, then the magnificent throb of beauty is incomprehensible and even a little despicable.
God alone knows where the future lies.
To my experience the mass of women are like this: most of them want a man, but don't want the sex, but they put up with it, as part of the bargain.
What's that as flies without wings, your ladyship? Time! Time!
Whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being.
Paris was sad. One of the saddest towns: weary of its now-mechanical sensuality, weary of the tension of money, money, money, weary even of resentment and conceit, just weary to death, and still not sufficiently Americanized or Londonized to hide the weariness under a mechanical jig-jig-jig!
Only youth has a taste of immortality.
It seems to me absolutely true, that our world, which appears to us the surface of all things, is really the bottom of a deep ocean: all our trees are submarine growths, and we are weird, scaly-clad submarine fauna, feeding ourselves on offal like shrimps. Only occasionally the soul rises gasping through the fathomless fathoms under which we live, far up to the surface of the ether, where there is true air.
Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it's touch we're afraid of.
Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.
Money poisons you when you've got it, and starves you when you haven't.
