Sacrificers ... are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice. Oh, the sacrificers, they get it both ways. A person knows themselves that they're able to do without.

Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.

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

Dogs are a habit, I think.

Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.

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

Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.