Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn’t! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you’re being persecuted, you hate what’s happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; you’re in a world of hate. Why, you wouldn’t recognize love if you met it! You’d suspect love! You’d think there was something behind it—some motive—some trick.

She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too.

I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.

No one ever hates without a cause.

But your book is wrong, Mrs. Strunk, says George, when it tells you that Jim is the substitute I found for a real son, a real kid brother, a real husband, a real wife. Jim wasn't a substitute for anything. And there is no substitute for Jim, if you'll forgive my saying so, anywhere.

The sea only drowns its lovers.

The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.