Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to for...get and to forget is to die. Everything is so much involved in and is so much a process of its opposite that, as it is almost fair to call death a process of life and life a process of death, so it is to call memory a process of forgetting and forgetting a process of remembering. There is never either absolute memory or absolute forgetfulness, absolute life or absolute death. So with light and darkness, heat and cold, you never get either all the light or all the heat out of anything. So with God and the devil; so with everything. Everything is like a door swinging backwards and forwards. Everything has a little of that from which it is most remote and to which it is most opposed and these antitheses serve to explain one another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Suddenly he found he had pressed the spring of the grenade. He struggled to pull it out of his pocket. It stuck in the narrow pock...et. His arm and his cold fingers that clutched the grenade seemed paralyzed. Then a warm joy went through him. He had thrown it. Anderson was standing up, swaying backwards and forwards. The explosion made the woods quake.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We can slide it Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this... Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers: They call it easing the Spring.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every notable advance in technique or organization has to be paid for, and in most cases the debit is more or less equivalent to t...he credit. Except of course when it's more than equivalent, as it has been with universal education, for example, or wireless, or these damned aeroplanes. In which case, of course, your progress is a step backwards and downwards.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is to be done with people who can't read a Sunday paper without messing it all up?... Show me a Sunday paper which has been l...eft in a condition fit only for kite flying, and I will show you an antisocial and dangerous character who has left it that way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I am writing a novel I must actually live the lives of my characters. If, for instance, my hero is a gambler on the French Ri...viera, I must make myself pack up and go to Cannes or Nice, willy-nilly, and there throw myself into the gay life of the gambling set until I really feel that I am Paul De Lacroix, or Ed Whelen, or whatever my hero's name is. Of course this runs into money, and I am quite likely to have to change my ideas about my hero entirely and make him a bum on a tramp steamer working his way back to America, or a young college boy out of funds who lives by his wits until his friends at home send him a hundred and ten dollars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nothing makes a man feel older than to hear a band coming up the street and not to have the impulse to rush downstairs and out on ...to the sidewalk.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We call ourselves a free nation, and yet we let ourselves be told what cabs we can and can't take by a man at a hotel door, simply... because he has a drum major's uniform on.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »