22 quotes
If you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.
Daniel Martin (1977)
Narcissism: when one grows too old to believe in one's uniqueness, one falls in love with one's complexity.
Daniel Martin (1977)
I am talking about the general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries, not their solution.
Daniel Martin (1977)
All good science is art. And all good art is science.
Daniel Martin (1977)
She seemed older to me, over-experienced by travel; needing to be learnt again, and I hadn’t the energy.
Daniel Martin (1977)
I didn’t know at that time Emily Dickinson’s great definition, her 'Publication is not the business of poets’; being a poet is all, being known as a poet is nothing.
Daniel Martin (1977)
I played him the Goldberg Variations. If one wishes to reduce a sensitive German to tears there is no surer lachrymatory.
Daniel Martin (1977)
He liked to be popular and in place of charm had to dispense alcohol…
Daniel Martin (1977)
There was a bright wind, it was a Dufy day, all bustle, movement, animated colour..
Daniel Martin (1977)
I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope – an impotence, in short and to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all...
Daniel Martin (1977)
I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.
Daniel Martin (1977)
Once again fear, and mystery, swept over me...I was infinitely far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical...
Daniel Martin (1977)
Though not large it had a certain elegance; a pilastered portico, windows with graceful pediments. The whitewashed façade was in shadow, a palid blue against the evening sky’s pale blue.
Daniel Martin (1977)
Hypotheses pinned me down, as Gulliver was pinned by the countless threads of the Lilliputians...
Daniel Martin (1977)
By this characteristically twentieth century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of accusing death, and hardened myself.
Daniel Martin (1977)
So I strode down to the school like some vengence-brewing chieftain in an Icelandic saga...
Daniel Martin (1977)
Pois eisai? She wanted to know. Pou pas? The old Homeric questions of the Greek peasant. Who art thou? Where goest thou?
Daniel Martin (1977)
I still couldn’t accept that this was not some nightmare, like some freak misbinding in a book, a Lawrence novel become, at the turn of a page, one by Kafka.
Daniel Martin (1977)
"You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient."
"I should not be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view."
Daniel Martin (1977)
Perhaps the clue lay in indispensibility. I was being taught some obscure metaphysical lesson about the place of man in existence, about the limitations of the egocentric view...
Daniel Martin (1977)