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

It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.

Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.

The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.

Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.

I can't see or feel the conflict between love and religion. To me, they're the same thing.