"The Razor's Edge" is the last major novel of British author, W. Somerset Maugham. Published when he was seventy, the book was immediately a success in Europe and America.
Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of his spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brilliant characters - his fiancée Isabel whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong repercussions, and Elliott Templeton, her uncle, a classic... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)
“The pathway to salvation is as narrow and as difficult to walk as a razor's edge.”Father Ensheim
“A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?”
“A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.”
“American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.”
“An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.”
“"For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they were born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives' tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things you can't come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you lived them. You can only know them if you are them."”
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