Charles Ryder Quotes

“But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere . . . in the heart of that gray city.”

“Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols . . . perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.”

“Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played . . . a small red flame . . . It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.”

“It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence;”

“My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of wartime.”

“I had been there before; I knew all about it.”

“Here love had died between me and the Army.”