("Lucky Jim")

Age doesn't not improve this novel, which I first gave up on way back in college. Kingsley Amis's character may be miserable but he still gets invited (and goes) to all those parties, why?

• Quickly deciding on his own word, Dixon said it to himself and then tried to flail his features into some sort of response to humour. Mentally, however, he was making a different face and promising himself he’d make it actually when next alone. He’d draw his lower lip in under his top teeth and by degrees retract his chin as far as possible, all this while dilating his eyes and nostrils.
• it was the prospect of reciting the title of the article he’d written. It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems.
• It has been good of you.’ <> Dixon alerted all his faculties. Conundrums that sounded innocuous or even pleasant were the most reliable sign of impending attack, the mysterious horseman sighted riding towards the bullion-coach.
• Margaret was laughing in the way Dixon had provisionally named to himself ‘the tinkle of tiny silver bells’. He sometimes thought that the whole corpus of her behaviour derived from translating such phrases into action,
• ‘If you would,’ he said. Fury flared up in his mind like forgotten toast under a grill.
• ‘I just wondered,’ Beesley said, bringing out the curved nickel-banded pipe round which he was trying to train his personality, like a creeper up a trellis.
• Dixon liked and revered him for his air of detesting everything that presented itself to his senses, and of not meaning to let this detestation become staled by custom.
• The sight of her seemed an irresistible attack on his own habits, standards, and ambitions: something designed to put him in his place for good. The notion that women like this were never on view except as the property of men like Bertrand was so familiar to him that it had long since ceased to appear an injustice. The huge class that contained Margaret was destined to provide his own womenfolk: those in whom the intention of being attractive could sometimes be made to get itself confused with performance; those with whom a too-tight skirt, a wrong-coloured, or no, lipstick, even an ill-executed smile could instantly discredit that illusion beyond apparent hope of renewal. But renewal always came: a new sweater would somehow scale down the large feet, generosity revivify the brittle hair, a couple of pints cite positive charm in talk of the London stage or French food.
• Dixon looked again at Bertrand’s eyes. They really were extraordinary: it seemed as if a sheet of some patterned material were tacked to the inside of his face, showing only at two arbitrary loopholes. What could a man with such eyes, such a beard, and (he noticed them for the first time) such dissimilar ears have to do with a man like Gore-Urquhart?
• Any measure short of, or not necessitating too much, violence would be justified. But there seemed to be no field of endeavour where he could employ a measure of that sort. For a moment he felt like devoting the next ten years to working his way to a position as art critic on purpose to review Bertrand’s work unfavourably.
• Dixon said quietly: ‘Well, what’s wrong with it, even if it is that and no more? If one man’s got ten buns and another’s got two, and a bun has got to be given up by one of them, then surely you take it from the man with ten buns.’ <> Bertrand and his girl were looking at each other with identical expressions, shaking their heads, smiling, raising their eyebrows, sighing. It was as if Dixon had just said that he didn’t know anything about art, but he did know what he liked.
• And, God, it was his due, wasn’t it? After all he’d put up with. But was it fair to her to implicate her in this sort of situation after all she’d had to put up with? As soon as Dixon recognized the mental envelope containing this question he thrust it away from him unopened,
• He quickly decided on a bluff, speak-my-mind approach as the best cloak for rudeness, past or to come. One of his father’s friends, a jeweller, had got away with conversing almost entirely in insults for the fifteen years Dixon had known him, merely by using this simple device.
• He went on like this while she looked him in the eyes. The rotten triteness of his words seemed, if anything, to help him to meet her gaze.
• he articulated these words behind closed lips: ‘You ignorant clod, you stupid old sod, you havering slavering get . . .’ Here intervened a string of unmentionables, corresponding with an oom-pah sort of effect in the orchestra. ‘You wordy old turdy old scum, you griping old piping old bum . . .’ Dixon didn’t mind the obscurity of the reference, in ‘piping’, to Welch’s recorder; he knew what he meant.
• Christine’s aim, he imagined, had been to show off the emphasis of her natural colouring and skin-texture. The result was painfully successful, making everybody else look like an assemblage of granulated half-tones.
• ‘Because you’re so sweet to me and I’m getting much too fond of you.’ She said this in a tone that combined the vibrant with the flat, like a great actress demonstrating the economical conveyance of strong emotion. This was her habit when making her avowals.
• It was doubtful, he considered, whether he was capable of being at all sweet, much less ‘so’ sweet, to anybody at all. Whatever passably decent treatment Margaret had had from him was the result of a temporary victory of fear over irritation and/or pity over boredom.
• As he left the bar with Christine at his side, Dixon felt like a special agent, a picaroon, a Chicago war-lord, a hidalgo, an oil baron, a mohock. He kept careful control over his features to stop them doing what they wanted to do and breaking out into an imbecile smirk of excitement and pride.
• ‘I’ll wait for you,’ he said in an urgent undertone. ‘In the porch. Twenty minutes. Don’t forget.’
• He turned and left by a route that gave a view of part of the dance-floor and band. She wouldn’t come, of course, but at any rate he’d made his gesture. In other words, he’d thought of a way of hurting himself more severely than usual, and in public.