I didn’t know that From Here to Eternity was a novel, and I’ve discovered that I’m not alone in Britain—none of my reader friends know it’s a novel. People know of the film, but few people in Britain of my generation and younger have seen it. We simply know the famous scene of Deborah Kerr, a classic English rose, and Burt Lancaster romping and kissing in the surf. I was thus surprised and intrigued when my American friend Tracey Koehlmoos listed it as her third favourite novel. The New York Times, I later found, included it in the great 100 novels of the 20th century. I decided I had to read it, and despite my hatred of superlatives I unhesitatingly call it “astonishing.”
Initially I was taken aback to discover that the novel is 962 pages long, but by the time I finished—after about three weeks—I wished it was longer. In many ways the novel is brutal, filled with cruelty, violence, swearing, drunkenness, and whoring, but it’s also stuffed with wisdom. I have taken 5000 words of quotes from the novel covering love, sex, death, being human, marriage, men and women, the army, war, music, religion, communication, reading and writing, politics, and medicine (in full below). I’ve grouped the quotes into those subjects, and the longest section is on love, although there’s not a sentimental sentence in the novel. I should make clear as well that the book is funny, not often laugh-out-loud funny but consistently funny.
The novel is centred on the Schofield barracks in Hawaii in 1941 and was published in 1951. Everybody reading the book knows that the bombing of Pearl Harbour and America’s entry into the war are coming, which gives tension and provides the setting for the climax at the end. The soldiers are not expecting the bombing, but they are from the beginning of the book expecting America to enter the war. The bombing does not start until page 827, and the novel, which I found started slowly, finished with a great flourish as the main characters move to the next stage of their lives. (I probably shouldn’t say the book starts slowly; what I really mean is that it takes a while to adjust to the prose, dialogue, and rhythm of the book—but that’s true of most great books.)
The book could be read just for its story, but that would be a terrible waste. The pleasure of the book is more in the reflections and insights, but you care about the characters and particularly the relationships. Tough but moral Prew who was a bum for years during the Great Depression falls in love with the whore Lorene, who is actually Alma Schmidt from rural Oregon making as much money as she can before hiding her past and becoming respectable. Hard bitten, cynical, extremely competent Milt has an affair against his best judgement with Karen Holmes, his superior’s bored wife; the affair brings out the best in both of them.
Jones, who based the novel on his own experiences, had great battles with the publishers over the swearing and the descriptions of how the soldiers would go with the queers for money but also beat them up to take their money, knowing they would never go the police. Much of the swearing and scenes with the queers were cut from the first edition, but they are back in the Penguin Modern Classics version that I read.
As Jones covered almost everything in the novel, outdoing the coverage of most 19th century novels, I wondered if I could find accounts of his thinking about the novel within the novel. These two quotes came closest:
“It was the kind of story Prew liked too, weird and unreasonable and senseless, almost occult, yet with a thread of hope still running always through it that maybe his theory that all men were basically alike, all hunting the same phantasmal mirror, was true.”
And:
“The way to get recognition in this world is to startle people. Somebody once said that bad publicity was better than no publicity. But I say, bad publicity is better than good publicity. Shock people and they remember you. Any dumb son of a bitch can get good publicity.”
All in all, it’s a great and hugely enjoyable book, and I urge British friends to read the book and spread the word.
Quotes from From Here to Eternity by James Jones
Being human
And it seemed to him then that every human was always looking for himself, in bars, in railway trains, in offices, in mirrors, in love, especially in love, for the self of him that is there, someplace, in every other human. Love was not to give oneself, but find oneself, describe oneself. And that the whole conception had been written wrong. Because the only part of any man that he can ever touch or understand is that part of himself he recognizes in him. And that he is always looking for the way in which he can escape his sealed bee cell and reach the other airtight cells with which he is connected in the waxy comb. And the only way that he had ever found, the only code, the only language, by which he could speak and be heard by other men, could communicate himself, was with a bugle.
There are times every man must be alone and in the squadroom there is no aloneness, only loneliness.
That other part of his mind that never entered into anything and always stood outside himself observing, made a mental note.
A man himself is nothing.’ ‘Well in a way,’ Stark said, ‘thats true. Because its who he knows and not the man himself that counts. But in another way its not true either, not true at all. Because listen: what a man is, Sam, is always the same. And nothing in God’s world, no kind of philosophy, no Christian Morals, none of that stuff, can change it. What a man is just comes out in a different channel, thats all. Its like a river that finds the old channel dammed up and moves into a new channel where the current’s just as strong, only it moves in a different direction.’
‘Look: we livin in a world thats blowin itself to hell, as fast as five hundred million people can arrange it. In a world like that, theres ony one thing a man can do; and thats to find something thats his, sam, really his and will never let him down, and then work hard at it and for it and it will pay him back. With me its my kitchen …’
In this world, any more, with things like they are, the hardest of all hard things was to know the real from the illusion, to meet one other human being breath to breath without the prefabricated soundproofed walls of modern sanitation always in between and know in meeting that this was this human and not this human’s momentary role;
Only in the bad spells did life frighten him with its unbelievable cruelty, its inconceivable injustice, its incredible pointlessness.
‘Every man has the right to kill himself,’ the big man said gently, appropriating the subject as if there was no question to his right to it. ‘Its the only absolute inviolable right a man does have, the only act he can commit which nobody else has a sayso in, the one irrevocable deed he can execute without outside influence. The old Anglo-Saxon term of “freedom” came from that: “free” and “doom,” with the idea that every man always had that last final resort that nobody could take away from him, if he wanted to avail himself of it.
‘In our world, citizens,’ the big man said gently, ‘theres only one way a man can have freedom, and that is to die for it, and after he’s died for it it dont do him any good. Thats the whole problem, citizens. In a nutshell.’
You cant take one subject, like economics, and with it escape the problems of all the rest of the subjects, like sex.
You have a strong sense of right and wrong. Thats why you got in the Stockade in the first place,
‘It seems like life is made up of saying hello to people we dont like and good-by to people we do.’
‘Thats horse shit,’ Jack Malloy said. ‘Sentimental horse shit. Dont ever let me hear you say a thing like that again. You just happen to be going through a period of the goodbys. Every man has them to go through at different times. Now shut up with that crap.’
‘In the Stockade it was easy, it was simple. You had somebody over you that you hated and plenty of time to hate them, and plenty of help hating them, and you did what they told you and just hated them, without having to worry about hurting them any because you couldnt have hurt them anyway.’
‘A mans got to decide for himself what he has to do,’ Prew said. ‘Everybody decides for themself,’ Warden said. ‘And always wrong.’
Theres no other way for it to be. Whenever a menace is conquered, a new more subtle menace arises. There is no other way it could be.’
The good thing about that Stendhal, he understood the very important place that misery and tragedy played in the making of a full happiness.
Marriage
There must be more, there must be, something told her, some place, somewhere, there must be another reason, above, beyond, somewhere another Equation beside this virgin + marriage + motherhood + grandmotherhood = honor, justification, death. There must be another language, forgotten unheard unspoken, than the owning of an American’s Homey Kitchen complete with dinette, breakfast nook, and fluorescent lighting.
Thats the way they all feel, all the men who finally get married. Like Dhom felt. On one side they see their freedom, and on the other they see a piece of ass right there where they can always get it, without all the bushwhacking buildup, always there handy to be reached, without the months of preparation, or the sluts that are the other alternative.
Army
It is the knowledge of the unendingness and of the repetitious uselessness, the do it up so it can be done again, that makes Fatigue fatigue.
There are times every man must be alone and in the squadroom there is no aloneness, only loneliness.
Good generals had to have the type of mind that saw all men as masses, as numerical groups of Infantry, Artillery, and mortars that could be added and subtracted and understood on paper. They had to be able to see men as abstractions that they worked on paper with.
Since I cannot forget what the truth is, I gravitated, naturally, along with the rest of the social misfits who are honest into the Army
‘Officers,’ he snorted. ‘West Point socialites. Learn to play polo, poker and bridge and which fork to use, so they can mingle with society and marry a goddam wife with money who can entertain and teach the gook maids how to serve English style and copy the colonial Britisher and be goddam professional soldiers with a private income, just like Lord-Kiss-My-Ass.
There were so many who prided themselves on being misfits, rebellion for rebellion’s sake, a sort of inverse sentimentality, romance in reverse. You do it some yourself. But on the other hand, what? The officers. How to choose between a false success and a fake failure? between a fake God and a false Devil?
‘I think he was nuts. He loved the Army. Anybody who loves the Army is nuts. I think he was crazy enough to have made a good paratrooper, if he wasnt so small, or commando. He loved the Army the way most men love their wives. Anybody who loves the Army that much is nuts.’
War
We, with all our industrial power will sit back and vacillate (when everybody knows war is inevitable) until somebody or other attacks us and makes us fight – and incidentally gets a great big drop on us.’
While it might be years off yet it did something to a man to see the future run up to, and stop at, the blank wall of a war. It made him aware that he had better get all he was going to get out of his life now, and it made him want his afternoons.
A thirty-year-man’s got to take advantage of his wars; he’s ony liable to get one or two. If he gets two he’s damn lucky.
Men and women
To a man who lives his life among the flat hairy angularities of other men, all women are round and soft, and all are inscrutable and strange.
Climbing the darkened stairs, feeling the maleness in him, the maleness that was denied, hushed, denounced, hedged in, scourged, damned, condemned, and used, feeling the heavy pendulous maleness of the testes in their sac, loaded now to bursting, distended, swinging full bellied as he moved his legs, feeling the excess that overflowed rancidly, burning acidly all through his blood and settling finally in his throat, a thick acidulous phlegm,
She had smiled sadly with the great sadness of a Christian martyr who forgives the Romans, and accused herself of how she always messed things up and ruined everything she touched, and how she guessed she just wasnt an outdoor girl, although it had seemed fine when they had talked about it, in the bedroom, back at Schofield, and she really truly thought it would be better if he would get some other woman for it, she wouldnt mind.
It was easy for her, she wouldnt care if they carried on their love affair entirely by correspondence. She would probably prefer it.
And they called them the weaker sex! That was prone to crack up and cry at every crisis! Like hell. The women ran this world; and nobody knew it better than a man in love.
…aware that they had reached the absolute end of sane verbal conversation without having explained a single damned thing to the other, overwhelmed by the eternal semantics of the sexes.
Communication
And the only way that he had ever found, the only code, the only language, by which he could speak and be heard by other men, could communicate himself, was with a bugle.
Where theres smoke theres fire and where theres platitude theres liar.
The way to get recognition in this world is to startle people. Somebody once said that bad publicity was better than no publicity. But I say, bad publicity is better than good publicity. Shock people and they remember you. Any dumb son of a bitch can get good publicity.’
Reading and writing
What the hell good does reading do you?’ he demanded angrily. ‘The thing is to live, act, do. You read all your life and what have you got?’
‘I dont know,’ Prew said. ‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ Slade said. ‘Thats what. Not a damn thing.’
‘As you grow older, you will find imagination sometimes produces a truth that is greater than any fact.’
It was the kind of story Prew liked too, weird and unreasonable and senseless, almost occult, yet with a thread of hope still running always through it that maybe his theory that all men were basically alike, all hunting the same phantasmal mirror, was true.
He had always kept on reading. And of it all, all the places, all the jobs, all the experiences, all the women, he still wanted the USA.
Music
And the only way that he had ever found, the only code, the only language, by which he could speak and be heard by other men, could communicate himself, was with a bugle.
The music came to him across the now bright, now dull, slowly burning cigarette of each man’s life, telling him its ancient secret of all men, intangible, unfathomable, defying long-winded descriptions, belying intricate cataloguings, simple, complete, asking no more, giving no less, words that said nothing yet said all there was to say.
He raised the bugle to the megaphone, and the nervousness dropped from him like a discarded blouse, and he was suddenly alone, gone away from the rest of them.
The first note was clear and absolutely certain. There was no question or stumbling in this bugle. It swept across the quadrangle positively, held just a fraction longer than most buglers hold it. Held long like the length of time, stretching away from weary day to weary day. Held long like thirty years. The second note was short, almost too short, abrupt. Cut short and too soon gone, like the minutes with a whore. Short like a ten minute break is short. And then the last note of the first phrase rose triumphantly from the slightly broken rhythm, triumphantly high on an untouchable level of pride above the humiliations, the degradations.
The notes rose high in the air and hung above the quadrangle. They vibrated there, caressingly, filled with an infinite sadness, an endless patience, a pointless pride, the requiem and epitaph of the common soldier, who smelled like a common soldier, as a woman once had told him. They hovered like halos over the heads of the sleeping men in the darkened barracks, turning all grossness to the beauty that is the beauty of sympathy and understanding. Here we are, they said, you made us, now see us, dont close your eyes and shudder at it; this beauty, and this sorrow, of things as they are. This is the true song, the song of the ruck, not of battle heroes; the song of the Stockade prisoners itchily stinking sweating under coats of grey rock dust; the song of the mucky KPs, of the men without women who collect the bloody menstrual rags of the officers’ wives, who come to scout the Officers’ Club – after the parties are over. This is the song of the scum, the Aqua-Velva drinkers, the shameless ones who greedily drain the half filled glasses, some of them lipsticksmeared, that the partyers can afford to leave unfinished.
This is the song of the men who have no place, played by a man who has never had a place, and can therefore play it. Listen to it. You know this song, remember? This is the song you close your ears to every night, so you can sleep. This is the song you drink five martinis every evening not to hear. This is the song of the Great Loneliness, that creeps in like the desert wind and dehydrates the soul. This is the song you’ll listen to on the day you die. When you lay there in the bed and sweat it out, and know that all the doctors and nurses and weeping friends dont mean a thing and cant help you any, cant save you one small bitter taste of it, because you are the one thats dying and not them; when you wait for it to come and know that sleep will not evade it and martinis will not put it off and conversation will not circumvent it and hobbies will not help you to escape it; then you will hear this song and, remembering, recognize it. This song is Reality. Remember? Surely you remember?
Day is done …
Gone the sun …
From-the-lake
From-the-hill
From-the-sky
Rest in peace
Sol jer brave
God is nigh …
Religion and belief
‘I believe the only sin is a conscious waste of energy. I believe all conscious dishonesty, such as religion, politics and the real estate business, are a conscious waste of energy. I believe that at a remarkable cost in energy people agree to pretend to believe each other’s lies so they can prove to themselves their own lies are the truth, like my brother. Since I cannot forget what the truth is, I gravitated, naturally, along with the rest of the social misfits who are honest into the Army
The clerks, the kings, the thinkers; they talked, and with their talking ran the world. The truckdrivers, the pyramid builders, the straight duty men; the ones who could not talk, they built the world out of their very tonguelessness – so the talkers could talk about how to run it, and the ones who built it.
But how can you, with your past experience, take anybody else’s judgment? You who’ve seen so many of the sure ones proved so wrong so many times? Conviction and intensity are not the coin of truth, they alone can never buy it.
Every man’s supposed to have certain rights.’ ‘Certain inalienable rights,’ Stark said, ‘to liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness. I learnt it in school, as a kid.’
‘Not that,’ Prew said. ‘Thats The Constitution. Nobody believes that any more.’
‘Sure they do,’ Stark said. ‘They all believe it. They just dont do it. But they believe it.’
Life dont fit no gospels? Life makes gospels – afterwards.
‘You think religions are constant things? inflexible and solid and born full-grown? Religions evolve. They grow out of a need, just like any other natural phenomenon, and they follow the same natural laws. They are born, grown, have sons, and illegitimate sons, and die.
A guy named Spinoza wrote a sentence once. He said: Because a man loves God he must not expect God to love him in return.
Prew sat by himself and wondered wildly if he had not already met the new Messiah of the new faith Malloy had also prophesied. A Messiah who refused a following and preferred to work alone. Met him, and lived alongside of him, and failed to recognize him.
Love
And it seemed to him then that every human was always looking for himself, in bars, in railway trains, in offices, in mirrors, in love, especially in love, for the self of him that is there, someplace, in every other human. Love was not to give oneself, but find oneself, describe oneself. And that the whole conception had been written wrong. Because the only part of any man that he can ever touch or understand is that part of himself he recognizes in him. And that he is always looking for the way in which he can escape his sealed bee cell and reach the other airtight cells with which he is connected in the waxy comb. And the only way that he had ever found, the only code, the only language, by which he could speak and be heard by other men, could communicate himself, was with a bugle.
What happens to love?’
‘Did you, personally, ever see any of this love?’
‘I dont know. Sometimes I think I did, and then sometimes I think it was imagination.’
‘It seems to me,’ Stark said, ‘that people only love the things they can get something they want out of. And that they dont love anything they cant get what they want out of. Love, it seems to me, is a matter of expediency.’
He wished furiously a lot of things. Once he even wished furiously he was dead and in hell. He knew then that he was in love.
Those afternoons, those hot bright swim-cool afternoons, that seemed to be more dream than reality and that he wanted to go on like that forever. The future was too vague of an investment to risk all the capital he had. Let the future look out for itself, like everybody else. It was of age, wasnt it? To hell with the future, as long as these afternoons go on like this forever.
He had worked at every kind of job from bartender to tourist-guide between berths. And he had loved every kind of woman from bony Jap geisha to featherbed German barmaid.
‘I’ve never laid a woman that I didnt love. Maybe she made me dislike her afterwards, for some other reason. But at the moment of screwing her, I was in love with her. I offer that as an observed fact, without attempts at explanation or justification. It is a thing that I have found true of most men, if you can get them to talk and admit it.’
Prew, mulling this one over and applying it to himself, was a little shocked to find he had to admit it was true of him too.
Did you ever truly love some body, or some thing? A woman; did you ever love a woman? If you ever really truly loved a thing, you never even considered forgiving it something, did you? Anything it did was all right with you, wasnt it? No matter how much it hurt you. You dont have to forgive something you love. You forgive the ones you dont love.
Jack Malloy was able to love the human race because he expected ahead-of-time to be let down by his friends and hurt by his enemies and betrayed by his leaders. He saw these things as natural reactions to be anticipated, instead of perfidies to be decried.
The same thing has happened to me all my life. I’ve tried to teach people things I saw but they always take them wrong and use them wrong. Its because theres something lacking in me. I preach passive resistance and a new kind of God with a new kind of love that understands, but I dont practice it. At least not enough. Sometimes, I dont think I’ve ever loved anything in my life.
They told you love was the end. But love wasn’t the end. But they didnt tell you where to go next. If only they could stop and not go on creating. But who ever saw a human being who could stop and not go on creating?
My point, his mind said, the apex of my conclusions, is that the illusion of romantic love, being an illusion grounded on the principle of you build me up and I build you up, cannot last through the years of you tear me down and I tear you down. Thats why the men step out and the women take to religion.
But as long as you can keep the illusion, he argued grimly, you can love. And if you’ve got the illusion, then by god you do love. Reality or no reality.
True, his mind said, coolly. And marriage is the great illusion breaker. You don’t believe me, try it.
You see, it said, the foundation principle behind the illusive principle of Romantic Love – the Reality, in other words, behind the Fantasy – is Love of Self; which, up to the time of this paper, has remained undiscovered.
Probably, Warden said, thats because the illusion has received such general recognition and acceptance through the medium of commercial advertising?
Yes, it said indifferently. Now, to get back. What you really love, then, is Milt Warden. As long as she builds you up and makes you love Milt Warden more, because he is such a fine outstanding man, you love her too, naturally. Because she makes you a finer better man. But, when she begins to tear you down and make you love Milt Warden less, because he’s such an obvious no good son of a bitch, you naturally dont love her near so much any more. Because you arent such a nice person any more. And eventually, when it keeps on long enough, you dont love her any more at all. Its really very simple, once you understand it.
It was not true that all men killed the things they loved. What was true was that all things killed the men who loved them.
He felt that way about everything about her. Not envy so much, not jealousy, as just a tremendous hunger to have shared.
Love either starves to death and becomes a shadow, or else it dies young and remains a dream.
‘Two people who have meant as much to each other as we have dont fade out of each other’s lives,’ Karen said.
Sex
He could see it all in his mind, just the way it must have happened, with Stark holding her, her lying on the bed as he himself had seen her, every secret open and unveiled, the heavy breathing like a distance runner, the eyelids shuddering closed at that moment when you went clear out of your own body and you knew nothing and knew everything, you a long ways off with only a slim silver cord attaching you to yourself back there.
The high well lighted room gave them the secret and anonymous solitude that only a hotel room can give as outside the locked door he heard rug-muffled footsteps passing along the corridor and whispered voices coming to him faintly and keys rattling and doors slamming shut with secret finality, finality finality finality of finalities saith the Sergeant all is finality what profit hath a man of all his probabilities under the sun one probability passeth away and another probability cometh all things are full of probabilities man cannot utter it but finality abideth forever in a hotel room there is no remembrance of former probabilities neither shall there be anticipation of probabilities that are to come with those that come after thus spakest I the Sergeant who was king over Israel in Jerusalem where I dwelt in the valley of the shadow of a hotel room with my beloved who is the rose of Sharon and the lilies of the valley of the shadow of a hotel room where there is no inconsistency where there is no probabilities where there is finality remain remain O Shulamite remain remain that ye may give me to drink of the spiced wine of the juice of thy pomegranate in a hotel room where nothing is inconstant finality is all is one and is all and abideth for ever and ever and ever amen days without number while all the probabilities run down to the world yet the world is not full.
‘Its pretty hard to want to sleep with a man who prefers other women.’
Death
You always wondered just how it would come. You always thought it would somehow be special. What you couldnt imagine was how it would have this just everyday quality. Like taking a crap. Or getting your socks off. Or rolling a smoke. Just common, ordinary, everyday. You sweated and sweated it out, and waited and waited on it, all your life you waited on it, and then finally it came, and all the time you had hoped you would be able to do it well, and then it came, and there it was, and now you would see if you would do it well. You did not guess it would be everyday, though. It would have been a lot easier to do well if it had been special.
He was sliding down a long skislide of long snow, like. And he could feel himself beginning to go clear out of himself. And the cord he had seen that time in the Stockade that looked like it was made of come kept stretching and stretching as he coasted. Then he slowed and stopped coasting, delicately like, as if something hadnt quite made up its mind yet, and then began to come back in a little. So this was the way it was, hunh. Who would of guessed it was like this.
All go right on. He was selfish. He did not want it all to go right on.
You wouldnt think it would take so long. Even all tore up, it took so long. My body’s all tore up. My body. He did not want his body to be all tore up. You can let go if you want to. They’d never know.
You cant speak. You cant move. And its taking too long. And my body’s all tore up. Tore to pieces. Tore all up. It’s a shame. And they’d never know.
But you’d know. You got to do it right. It wont take very long. Just a minute more now. And you want to do it good. Even if nobody will know it. Just another minute. Then it will end. Then it will be over.
If you could just say something. Just a word. If you could just even move a little. If you could just do anything, besides just lay and look at them, and look at it. Christ, but the world was a lonesome place.
Politics
You’re going on the idea of the world as people say it is, instead of as it really is. In this world, no man really has any rights at all. Except what rights he can grab holt of and hang on to. And usually the only way he can get them is by taking them away from somebody else.
He threw it on the ground with all his strength, throwing with it all the overpowering injustice of the world that he could not stomach nor understand nor explain nor change.
he had learned from all those pictures to believe in fighting for the underdog, against the top dog. He had even made himself a philosophy of life out of it; they had taught it to him well; it was ingrained. It was too ingrained to be dropped later after ’37 when everything began to change, leaving him an anachronism. So that he had gone right on, unable to stop believing that if the Communists were the underdog in Spain then he believed in fighting for the Communists in Spain; but that if the Communists were the top dog back home in Russia and the (what would you call them in Russia? the traitors, I guess) traitors were the bottom dog, then he believed in fighting for the traitors and against the Communists. He believed in fighting for the Jews in Germany, and against the Jews in Wall Street and Hollywood. And if the Capitalists were top dog in America and the proletariat the underdog, then he believed in fighting for the proletariat against the Capitalists. This too-ingrained-to-be-forgotten philosophy of life of his had led him, a Southerner, to believe in fighting for the Negroes against the Whites everywhere, because the Negroes were nowhere the top dog, at least as yet.
It, unlike other philosophies of life, had only one simple danger to look out for. And that was that in fighting for the underdog you do not ever let yourself become top dog, or else you would cornhole your own philosophy.
The dying British school of Paternal Imperialism, the school that would never work the Colonial natives to death unless there was a missionary there to give them their last rites.’
There was a singular quality about Jack Malloy. When he looked at you with his unembarrassed-dreamer’s eyes and talked to you with that soft powerful voice, you began to labor under the delusion that you were the most important person on this, or on any other, planet; and you believed you could do many things you never would have thought you could.
Medicine
“God knows what the medical profession would do if it didnt have its hysterectomies and their hystero-derivatives. Probably all go broke and vote for socialized medicine after all, I guess.”
Powerful images and sayings
Preem looks like a man who either seen a miracle, or was hit at the base of the skull with a rubber hammer.’
‘As you grow older, you will find imagination sometimes produces a truth that is greater than any fact.’
The joyously unhappy tragedy of this earth
‘Never put things off,’ Slade said, almost frantically. ‘You’ll wake up and find them gone.’
Its stupid to live all your life in the future when there may not be any.
Work without purpose, work without end, work without pride.
Almost a criminal, almost an artist, but not either …’ [Jones’s description of Prew—and others in the book?]
