Self-love seems so often unrequited.

There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.

Dinner at the Huntercombes' possessed only two dramatic features - the wine was a farce and the food a tragedy.

One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.

I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.

Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.

A dance to the music of time.