2
" London, December 1915. In the master bedroom (never was the estate agent's epithet more appropriate) of Flat 21, Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, the distinguished author is dying - slowly, but surely. In Flanders, less than two hundred miles away, other men are dying more quickly, more painfully, more pitifully - young men, mostly, with their lives still before them, blank pages that will never be filled. The author is seventy-two. He has had an interesting and varied life, written many books, travelled widely, enjoyed the arts, moved in society (one winter he dined out 107 times), and owns a charming old house in Rye as well as the lease of this spacious London flat with its fine view of the Thames. He has had deeply rewarding friendships with both men and women. If he has never experienced sexual intercourse, that was by his own choice, unlike the many young men in Flanders who died virgins either for lack of opportunity or because they hoped to marry and were keeping themselves chaste on principle. "
― David Lodge , Author, Author
4
" I gave her the world, the moon, the sun, the stars, the planets... I gave her my breath, my voice, my sight, my life... I gave her memories, dreams, happiness... I gave her care and compassion... I gave her everything... and with sickly curved words, venom dripping from her fingers, she whispered in a way that would shatter glass... between her poisonous lips and her barbed teeth, she told me a story of blackness and catastrophe... from her mind a story of corruption and infamy sprang, her first touch an eternal perversion of my vision of life, an absolute seduction from the face of unbearable desire herself... the chills of a dead soul are frosty, a clouded layer of ash fills my insides, specks of dust fill my veins, empty thoughts smother my mind... and in the final steps of our pitifully destructive dance, I will dip you low, caress you so closely, feel the softness of your neck with the skin of my lips and, for that single moment, lost in the promise in your eyes and the intoxicating scent of your taunt body, I saw a sort of perfection that in any other place and light I would only hopelessly attempt to imagine... a horribly curious vividly creative swirl of chaos and flesh eating light, a specter of glow, paint and sound whose first inhalation is the slow quiver of last exhale, my exhale, my final whisper... I only wish I could have done more... but so impossible was it to resist what made her, her... "
10
" People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over...
We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered criticism. It's worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy. A year later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper's ownership, consequence: more confusion, more contradiction, a sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their distillation, the reaction against them- "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
