This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.

The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.

I can give you a spirit love, I have given you this long, long time; but not embodied passion. See, you are a nun. I have given you what I would give a holy nun...In all our relations no body enters. I do not talk to you through the senses - rather through the spirit. That is why we cannot love in the common sense.

I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies - thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.

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.

The sense of wonder, that is our sixth sense.