One should never go back to a place one has loved; for, however, rough the going forward is, it is better than the snuffing out-of-love return.

Sex divorced from love is the thief of personal dignity.

England, where nobody ever says what they mean: and by denying feeling, kill it off stone-cold at the roots.

I don't trust sentimentality in men; it goes with tyranny; you can't have one without the other.

When the desire is on for one particular person, nobody else will do.

Anyone who has attempted to create knows the hellishness of it, which consists in the final inescapability from it. Knows that anything, however deadly humdrum to drug the senses, is preferable to it. Knows the gigantic effort to get started on the boundless, unwieldy, shapeless material; the forest of hesitations; of what to keep and what to throw out; the running-out terror and reluctance in one of finishing.

Anybody who thinks there is any vague chance of adult exchange with a child is up the spout; and would be much less disappointed if they recognized the chasm unbridgeably dividing them.