Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.

But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing.

One's sentiments -- call them that -- one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power.

When one is a child, the disposition of objects, tables and chairs and doors, seems part of the natural order: a house-move lets in chaos - as it does for a dog.

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.

Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.