The spirit of the place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end the strange, sinister spirit of the place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens.

A man and a woman are new to one another throughout a life-time, in the rhythm of marriage that matches the rhythm of the year. Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the repulsion, always different, always new.

The word arse is as much god as the word face. It must be so, otherwise you cut off your god at the waist.

That's how women are with me " said Paul. "They want me like mad but they don't want to belong to me.

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

For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.

I should think the American admiration of five-minute tourists has done more to kill the sacredness of old European beauty and aspiration than multitudes of bombs would have done.