The Heart of the Matter Quotes

“His hilarity was like a scream from a crevasse.”

“He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.”

“He whispered, 'Oh God, I have deserted you. Do not desert me.'”

“We are all of us resigned to death; it's life we aren't resigned to.”

“He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that it is where we really belong.”

“'Waking up will be the worst. There's always a moment when one forgets that everything's different.”

“No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.”

“Wikipedia: The Heart of the Matter”

“To start off happy," Harris said. "It must make an awful difference afterwards. Why, it might become a habit, mightn't it?"”

“He had read somewhere that love had been invented in the eleventh century by the troubadours. Why had they not left us with lust?"”

“Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.”

“God can wait, he thought: how can one love God at the expense of one of his creatures? Would a woman accept the love for which a child had to be sacrificed?”

“Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.”

“One must be reasonable, he told himself, and recognize that despair doesn't last (is that true?), that love doesn't last (but isn't that the very reason that despair does?)[...]”

“It isn't beauty that we love, he thought, it's failure - the failure to stay young for ever, the failure of nerves, the failure of the body. Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long.”

“People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person’s habitual misery.”

“'You can look after yourself. You survive the cross every day. You can only suffer. You can never be lost. Admit that you must come second to these others.' And myself, he thought, [...] I must come last.”

“She put her hand out beside her and touched the other pillow, as though perhaps after all there was one chance in a thousand that she was not alone, and if she were not alone now she would never be alone again.”

“'It's not really much good tearing out a page because you can see the place where it's been torn.' [...] 'You can pull a stamp out,' she said with terrible youthful clarity, 'and you don't know that it's ever been there.'”

“The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and the philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.”