Happiness is a work of art. Handle with care.

... caprice is as ruinous as routine.

And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.

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

We shall hurt others less. Isn't it, after all, what you always wanted?

Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.