More quotes from Deptford

"Dr. von Haller: Oh, come. We all create an outward self with which to face the world, and some people come to believe it is what they truly are. So they people the world with doctors who are nothing outside the consulting-room, and judges who are nothing when they are not in court, and businessmen who wither in boredom when they have to retire from business, and teachers who are forever teaching. That is why they are such poor specimens when they are caught without their masks on. They have lived chiefly through the Persona."

"... every man who amounts to a damn has several fathers, and the man who begat him ... may not be the most important father. The father you choose for yourself are the significant ones. But you didn't choose Boy, and you never knew him. No; no man knows his father. If Hamlet hd known his father he would never have made such an almighty fuss about a man who was fool enough to marry Gertrude."

"It all came about because of boredom. Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in."

"'I don't agree,' said Ingestree. 'I think joking about the past is a way fo suggesting that it wasn't really important. A way of veiling its horror, perhaps. We shudder when we hear of yesterday's plane accident, in which seventy people were killed; but we become increasingly philosophical about horrors that are further away. What is the Charge of the Light Brigade now? We remember it as a military blunder... We joke about the historic fact and the poetic fact. But how many people ever think of the young men that charged? Who takes five minutes to summon up in his mind what they felt as they rushed to death? It is the fate of the past to be fuel for humour.
"'Have you put your finger on it?' said Lind... 'Jokes dissemble horrors and make them seem unimportant. And why? Is it in order that more horrors may come? In order that we may never learn anything from experience? I have never been very fond of jokes. I being to wonder if they are not evil.'"

"'But what's an autobiography? Surely it's a romance of which one is oneself the hero. Otherwise, why write the thing?'"