Nathan Cull

“The hardness in her eyes and face disturbed me. 'Why is she so cold?' I asked myself. 'Why?' Perhaps she sensed my anxiety, my hunger to communicate, because for an instant her expression softened, and she seemed to offer a bridge between us. But I felt that it was a temporary and fragile bridge swaying high above an abyss.”
― Ernesto Sábato, The Tunnel

“We had only just lain down on the bed when the raid started. It made no difference. Death never mattered at those times - in the early days I used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the watching her torch trail across to the opposite side of the common like the tail-light of a slow car driving away.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“We saw each other for the first time, drinking bad South African sherry because of the war in Spain. I noticed Sarah, I think, because she was happy: in those years the sense of happiness had been a long while dying under the coming storm. One detected it in drunken people, in children, seldom elsewhere.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Sire, as between clothes and countenance, you are all right, there is no discrepancy. Your soldierly stride, your lordly port - these will not do. You stand too straight, your looks are too high, too confident. The cares of a kingdom do not stoop the shoulders, they do not droop the chin, they do not depress the high level of the eye-glance, they do not put doubt and fear in the heart and hang out the signs of them in slouching body and unsure step. It is the sordid cares of the lowly born that do these things. You must learn the trick; you must imitate the trademarks of poverty, misery, oppression, insult, and the other several and common inhumanities that sap the manliness out of a man and make him a loyal and proper and approved subject and a satisfaction to his masters, or the very infants will know you for better than your disguise, and we shall go to pieces at the first hut we stop at.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court