Babylon Revisited Quotes

It isn't given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.

I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.

He did not understand all he had heard, but from his clandestine glimpse into the privacy of these two, with all the world that his short experience could conceive of at their feet, he had gathered that life for everybody was a struggle, sometimes magnificent from a distance, but always difficult and surprisingly simple and a little sad.

Don’t ever phone if you can possibly come yourself. Don’t ever leave if you can stay.

and he suddenly realized the meaning of the word 'dissipate' -- to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something. In the little hours of the night every move from place to place was an enormous human jump, an increase of paying for the privilege of slower and slower motion.

We'll all be failures?" "Yes. I don't mean only money failures, but just sort of - of ineffectual and sad, and - oh, how can I tell you?

They had senselessly begun to abuse each other’s love, tear it into shreds.

And if you ain't a hoe, get up out my trap house!

Apostasy implies an absolute damnation only on the supposition of a previous perfect faith. Does that fix it?

Basil flushed and made a poor pass. He had been called by a nickname. It was a poor makeshift, but it was something more than the stark bareness of his surname or a term of derision. Brick Wales went on playing, unconscious that he had done anything in particular or that he had contributed to the events by which another boy was saved from the army of the bitter, the selfish, the neurasthenic and the unhappy. It isn’t given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.

I spoiled this city for myself. I didn't realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.