Another person’s illness is often harder to bear than one’s own.
We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.
A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.
A long marriage is very unifying, even if it’s not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.
In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication.
In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.
Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.
People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don’t admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It’s the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.
Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.
As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.
The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone’s life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession.
Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.
How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.
Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the same.
We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
The cry of equality pulls everyone down.