They haven’t left us much to believe in, have they? – even disbelief. I can’t believe in anything bigger than a home or vaguer than a human being.
And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.
I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.
Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.
She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.
Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.
Sentimentality – that’s what we call the sentiment we don’t share.
The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.
The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.
O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.
How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one’s presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another’s day.
What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?
Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.
I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.
You needn’t be so scared. Love doesn’t end. Just because we don’t see each other...
I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.
Any man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.
As long as one suffers one lives.
Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor.
As long as nothing happens anything is possible...