9 quotes
"Time is quick. Life is short."
A Male Child (1956)
"I kept myself very much to myself, as one does if one is old and doesn't much care for the people round about."
A Male Child (1956)
He relapsed into a silence in which his hopes scattered like mice into holes.
A Male Child (1956)
I was surprised, as one is, I think, whenever the tenuous thread of one's life suddenly connects, as friends, people one would have thought strangers.
A Male Child (1956)
How ignorant one is when faced with essential practical matters. How they trick and trap you into holes and corners.
A Male Child (1956)
"Every so often there's a generation likes us, Ian. Our only raison d'être to be blown to pieces in a war we imagine we believe in ideologically."
A Male Child (1956)
It is said that every seven years of your life you undergo a change which reflects itself in your attitude to your circumstances and to other people, and I think this may be true. If it is, then the change begins towards the end of a seven-year span, at the point, perhaps, where dissatisfaction with what you are doing and with where you are going sets in.
A Male Child (1956)
She laughed. "You haven't changed a bit. You never could stand criticism or leg-pulling. That's why you bored me, Ian. That was the trouble with your generation of so-called intellectual young men. All of you unmitigated, bloody bores with sloppy ideas and no remotest idea how to come to terms with life. When you found life coming to terms with you, you all wondered what the hell had hit you."
A Male Child (1956)
"I often look back now and regret that I never took my courage in both hands and went out into the world. That's really what a chap should do, Canning. Get out and look. Otherwise," again he paused, "Otherwise you never really see yourself, old man. And it's all so small and petty. A man isn't a man any longer."
A Male Child (1956)