“God,” she cried, “what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn't tell me the truth because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you be prepared for that? Everything we can't bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.”

You beat the liver out of a goose to get a pâté; you pound the muscles of a man's cardia to get a philosopher.

This head has risen above its hair in a moment of abandon known only to men who have drawn their feet out of their boots to walk awhile in the corridors of the mind.

One cup poured into another makes different waters; tears shed by one eye would blind if wept into another's eye. The breast we strike in joy is not the breast we strike in pain; any man's smile would be consternation on another's mouth.

Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out.

For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short; for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.

I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.