With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.

Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.

The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.

Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.

Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.

Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.