The novel is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered.

Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.

One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it, like any knight of the grail, and the journey is always towards the other soul, not away from it. . . . To love you have to learn to understand the other, more than she understands herself, and to submit to her understanding of you. It is damnably difficult and painful, but it is the only thing which endures.

If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work.

Every profound new movement makes a great swing also backwards to some older, half-forgotten way of consciousness.

They wanted genuine intimacy, but they could not get even normally near to anyone, because they scorned to take the first steps, they scorned the triviality which forms common human intercourse.

One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.