A Single Man: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics)

pylorus

the waters of the ocean are not really other than the waters of the pool?

The past is over. People make believe that it isn’t, and they show you things in museums. But that’s not the past. You won’t find the past in England. Or anywhere else, for that matter.”

Jim, lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other’s presence.

(He is continually starting these self-improvement projects: sometimes it’s memory training, sometimes a new diet, sometimes just a vow to read some unreadable Hundredth Best Book. He seldom perseveres in any of them for long.)

A minority has its own kind of aggression. It absolutely dares the majority to attack it. It hates the majority—not without a cause, I grant you. It even hates the other minorities, because all minorities are in competition: each one proclaims that its sufferings are the worst and its wrongs are the blackest.

Grant has no private income, a wife and three imprudently begotten children.

the overpowering sloth of sadness

Because a minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary.