The lovely Hazard girls', they used to call them. Huh. Lovely is as lovely does; if they looked like what they behave like, they'd frighten little children.

You were the living image of the entire Platonic shadow show, an illusion that could fill my emptiness with marvellous, imaginary things as long as, just as long as, the movie lasted, and then all would all vanish.

I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.

As for my father, few souls are less troubled. He can be simply pleased with us, pleased that we exist, and, from the vantage point of his wondrously serene old age, he contemplates our lives almost as if they were books he can dip into whenever he wants. His back pages, perhaps.

The clown may be the source of mirth, but - who shall make the clown laugh?

In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.

Your thin white face, chérie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect.