Clea
A worthwhile read if you have worked your way through the other books in the quartet, otherwise go back and start at Justine! This book is perfect in its development of the characters. It has a nonchalant air relative to the intense drama of the earlier novels. Very enjoyable.
he refused a chair, doubtless because he did not wish to crease those formidable trousers.
There was no room for human beings or thought of them under this vast umbrella of coloured death. Each drawn breath had become only a temporary refuge.
Here too there were ships split apart in geometrical sections which exposed their steaming intestines, ships laid open in Caesarian section: and into these wounds crawled an endless ant-like string of soldiers and blue-jackets humping canisters, bales, sides of oxen on blood-stained shoulders.
You cannot squeeze a hand with a missing finger as hard as you would like.
after gazing anxiously into my eyes placed a small cold kiss upon my right cheek. It was as cold as an obituary, dry as leather.
Her words rattled down like a hail of sods on an empty coffin.
‘The most tender, the most tragic of illusions is perhaps to believe that our actions can add or subtract from the total quantity of good and evil in the world.’
And if human personality is an illusion? And if, as biology tells us, every single cell in our bodies is replaced every seven years by another? At the most I hold in my arms something like a fountain of flesh, continuously playing, and in my mind a rainbow of dust.
And they talk of the romance of the East! Give me the Metropole at Brighton any day!
Andrew Doran
I've stayed there and thought it was lovely!
But if tragedy strikes suddenly the actual moment of its striking seems to vibrate on, extending into time like the sour echoes of some great gong, numbing the spirit, the comprehension.
that is cold...