Quotes from book

The Secret History

“though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”

“But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?’
Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.”

“There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”

“Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way.”

“We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?” “To live,” said Camilla. “To live forever”

“They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.”

“They understand not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good.”

“Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.”

“Are you happy here?" I said at last.
He considered this for a moment. "Not particularly," he said. "But you're not very happy where you are, either.”

“And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.”

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”

“He sailed through the world guided only by the dim lights of impulse and habit, confident that his course would throw up no obstacles so large that they could not be plowed over with sheer force of momentum.”

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”

“Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.”

“How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.”

“Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.”

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”

“Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment.”

“After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great.”