They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.

You don't want to love - your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere.

To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.

I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. There is not any part of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surfaces of the water.

I believe a man is born first unto himself - for the happy developing of himself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitudes of brothers.

How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene and dead ideas become obsessions.

And all the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She couldn't quite, quite love in hoplessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn't ever love at all.