There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.

If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

Failure or success seems to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is the wriggle.

Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.

The bully and his victim never quite forget their first relations.

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.