THE UNQUIET GRAVE - A WORD CYCLE - PALINURUS

• '"The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence."
•  
• "There is no pain in life equal to that which two lovers can inflict on each other".
•  
• "When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest actions, but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized."
•  
• "A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he starts forth, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts, and to second-rate friends."
•  
• "Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form."
•  
• "'Dry again?' said the Crab to the Rock-Pool. 'So would you be,' replied the Rock-Pool, 'if you had to satisfy, twice a day, the insatiable sea."
•  
• "Morning tears return; spirits at their lowest ebb. Approaching forty, sense of total failure; not a writer but a ham actor whose performance is clotted with egotism; dust and ashes; 'brilliant'. - that is not worth doing. Never will I make that extra effort to live according to reality which alone makes good writing possible: hence the manic-depressiveness of my style,—which is either bright, cruel and superficial; or pessimistic; moth-eaten with self-pity."
•  
• "Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk."
•  
• "No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning."
•  
• "Everything is a dangerous drug to me except reality, which is unendurable."
•  
• "Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out."
•  
• "The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream."
•  
• "The dread of loneliness is keener than the threat of bondage; and so we marry, again and again."