Fifth Business (Deptford Trilogy)

“I have not forgotten your questions about the woman you keep in the madhouse, Ramezay. I have said nothing on that subject during our last few dinners, but it has not been absent from my mind, you may be assured. Invariably I come back to the same answer: why do you worry? What good would it do you if I told you she is indeed a saint? I cannot mak

He had another delusion of the political novice: he was going to apply “sound business principles” to government and thereby give it a fine new gloss. So he attempted to become Conservative leader, but as he was a newcomer he had no chance of doing so. It seemed to me that everything about Boy was wrong for politics: he was very rich and could not

I shall say little about the war, because though I was in it from early 1915 until late 1917 I never found out much about it until later.

religion and Arabian Nights were true in the same way. (Later I was able to say that they were both psychologically rather than literally true, and that psychological truth was really as important in its own way as historical verification; but while I was a young soldier I had no vocabulary for such argument, though I sensed the truth of

For me, Willie’s recall from death is, and will always be, Mrs Dempster’s second miracle.

But David astonished me. “Poor Mum,” he said, “I guess she’s better off, really.” Now what was I to make of that, from a boy of fourteen?

From two until three I sat in Willie’s room, reading, and between three and half-past I did what I could for Willie while he died.

a dead man without any of the panoply of death is a desperately insignificant object.

I refused to laugh at them, for I was jealous of anybody who was funnier than I.