Стоунер

You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.

The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.

Недовольство было днями вежливого молчания, нежность была словом вежливой приязни.

в кабинете сидел сломленный человек, которому не суждено было вновь стать таким, каким он был.

Главное — разрушение нас самих, того, что мы делаем.

It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.

...she was, as she had said, almost happy with her despair; she would live her days out quietly, drinking a little more, year by year, numbing herself against the nothingness her life had become. He was glad she had that, at least; he was grateful that she could drink.

...he knew it was a feeling compounded of emotions so deep and intense that they could not be acknowledged because they could not be lived with.

It was a triumph in a way, but one of which he always remained amusedly contemptuous, as if it were a victory won by boredom and indifference.

They revealed that knowledge by grammatical usage: they progressed from the perfect—"We have been happy, haven't we?"—to the past—"We were happy—happier than anyone, I think"—and at last came to the necessity of discourse.

They wanted only to be left alone, to be themselves; and, wanting this, they knew they would not be left alone and they suspected that they could not be themselves.

Oh, how proper we seem to ourselves when we have no reason to be improper!

Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.

"I am not ill," she said. And she added in a voice that was calm, speculative, and almost uninterested, "I am desperately, desperately unhappy."

...everything you say is a fact, but none of it is true.

As he worked on the room, and as it began slowly to take a shape, he realized that for many years, unknown to himself, he had had an image locked somewhere within him like a shamed secret, an image that was ostensibly of a place but which was actually of himself. <...> ...as he repaired his furniture and arranged it in the room, it was himself that he was slowly shaping, it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself that he was making possible.

...an epiphany of knowing something through words that could not be put in words...

They were nervous and cautiously gay.

Her voice was thin and high, and it held a note of hopelessness that gave a special value to every word she said.