Цитаты из книги Суть дела

He felt as though he were turning his back on peace for ever. With his eyes open, knowing the consequences, he entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.

Life always repeated the same pattern: there was always, sooner or later, bad news that had to be broken, comforting lies to be uttered, pink gins to be consumed to keep misery away.

"Go on/' Helen said, "justify yourself."

"It would take too long," he said. "One would have to begin with the arguments for a God."

"Oh," she said impatiently, "why do you always tell me the truth? I don't want the truth all the time."

"Your work is much more important to you than I am/' Helen said, and the banality of the phrase, read in how many books, wrung his heart like the too mature remark of a child.

He had been in Africa when his own child died. He had always thanked God that he had missed that. It seemed after all that one never really missed a thing. To be a human being one had to drink the cup.

"Do you love me, Ticki?"

"What do you think?"

"Say it. One likes to hear it even if it isn't true."

She was not so happy as he would have expected: she always saw a little further than he hoped.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practises. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of good will carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn't name its price.

It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn't the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn't we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old death bed?

He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that that is where we really belong.

Женщинам трудно жить, если они не могут гордиться хоть чем-нибудь: собой, своим мужем, своей обстановкой.

"I'd miss you," he said.

"No, Ticki, you wouldn't," she said, and surprised him by the range of her sad spasmodic understanding.

"Darling," he said, "I love you' It was how he always began. Comfort, like the act of sex, developed a routine.

Revenge was good for the character: out of revenge grew forgiveness.

There was always a blacker corruption elsewhere to be pointed at. The scandalmongers of the Secretariat fulfilled a useful purpose they kept alive the idea that no one was to be trusted. That was better than complacence. Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn't had time to disguise itself?

He told himself: Be careful. This isn't a climate for emotion.It's a climate for meanness, malice, snobbery, but anything like hate or love drives a man off his head.

В книжках всегда бывает человек, которому можно открыть душу.

Но Таллиту просто не очень везет, а со стороны это похоже на честность.