Apart from the pleasure of looking at her and listening to her-of enjoying in her what others less discriminatingly but as liberally appreciated-he had the sense, between himself and her, of a kind of free-masonry of precocious tolerance and irony. They had both, in early youth, taken the measure of the world they happened to live in: they knew just what it was worth to them and for what reasons, and the community of these reasons lent to their intimacy its last exquisite touch.

And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them.

They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods

The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.

... caprice is as ruinous as routine.

It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own; and the mind which would bring this secret gem to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience.