I Like It Here (1958)

"After a moment Gomes said: 'I'm afraid I've been letting myself go. Do forgive me for talking so endlessly. It's a great fault of mine, I know.' The Bowens' protestations failed to stem a prolonged flood of eloquent and documented self-deprecation. He defended himself tentatively by suggesting that it was good for English people to hear what he had to say. Far outdoing him in the vigour, the Bowens aided this defence. He got up in the middle of it, put some money on the table and said abruptly; 'I hope you'll enjoy your stay in Portugal. For the tourist there are many attractions; for the residents, not quite so many.' He softened this rather cinematic apophthegm with a cordial handshake and a warmer version of his smile. His final wave, delivered from the driving seat of the most unnecessarily large of all the unnecessarily large cars on view, was also cordial.
  As Gomes drove violently away he seemed to be leaving behind him the impression that his audience had failed him in some way. Not having a couple of armoured divisions (with sea and air support) to place at Gomes' disposal, Bowen could not see how this could have been avoided in large part. Still, a penumbra of trivial insularity had been pretty effectively cast over British domestic squabbles about housing policy or the next round of wage claims. This endemic drabness would no doubt be dissipated, Bowen reckoned, if Tories could actually be witnessed in the course of jubilation over something or other to do with capital gains, if Labour could arrange to televise a bona fide very fat man occupied in watering the workers' beer. But as things were, Gomes seemed to have provided yet another excuse for people like Bowen to be politically apathetic at home."

That Uncertain Feeling (1955)

"I said carefully: 'Come on, now, Gareth, what about listening to the facts? You haven't answered them, you know.'
'Oh, facts,' Probert said scornfully. 'Fellows like you always trot out facts of one sort or another. You're so bogged down in your facts you've forgotten how to think.'
There's nothing to beat an attack on facts for making me angry. With a sort of expanding lightness in my chest, I said: 'Yes, I know, you prefer feelings, don't you? All right then, here's a feeling for you, boy. I feel you ought to stuff your...'"

Lucky Jim (1954)

 “Are you in love with him?”

 “I don’t much care for that word,” she said, as if rebuking a foul-mouthed tradesman.

 “Why not?”

 “Because I don’t know what it means.”

He gave a quiet yell. “Oh, don’t say that; no, don’t say that. It’s a word you must have come across in conversation and literature. Are you going to tell me it sends you flying to the dictionary each time? Of course you’re not. I suppose you mean it’s purely personal – sorry, got to get the jargon right – purely subjective?”

“Well, it is, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s right. You talk as if it’s the only thing that is. If you can tell me whether you like greengages or not, you can tell whether you’re in love with Bertrand or not, if you want to tell me, that is.”

 “You’re still making it much too simple. All I can really say is that I’m pretty sure I was in love with Bertrand a little while ago, and now I’m less sure. That up-and-down business doesn’t happen with greengages; that’s the difference.”

 “Not with greengages agreed. But what about rhubarb, eh? What about rhubarb? Ever since my mother stopped forcing me to eat it, rhubarb and I have been conducting a relationship that can swing between love and hate every time we meet.”

 “That’s all very well, Jim. The trouble with love is it gets you in such a state you can’t look at your own feelings dispassionately .”

“That would be a good thing if you could do it, would it?”

“Why, of course.”

He gave another quiet yell, this time some distance above a middle C. “You’ve got a long way to go, if you don’t mind me saying so, even though you are nice. By all means view your own feelings dispassionately, if you feel you ought to, but that’s nothing to with deciding whether (Christ) you’re in love. Deciding that’s no more difficult than the greengages business. What is difficult, and the time you really need this dispassionate rubbish, is deciding what to do about being in love if you are, whether you can stick the person you love enough to marry them, and so on.”

 “Why, that’s exactly what I’ve been saying, in different words.”

 “Words change the thing, and anyway the whole procedure’s different. People get themselves all steamed up about whether they’re in love or not, and can’t work it out, and their decisions go all to pot. It’s happening every day. They ought to realize that the love part’s perfectly easy; the hard part is the working-out, not about love, but about what they’re going to do. The difference is that they can get their brains going on that, instead of taking the sound of the word ‘love’ as a signal to switching them off. They can get somewhere, instead of indulging in a sort of orgy of emotional self-catechising about how you know you’e in love, and what love is anyway, and all the rest of it. You don’t ask yourself what greengages are, or how you know whether you like them or not, do you? Right?”