to leap is not only to leap, it is to hit the ground somewhere.

Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.

I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author-detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.

Dogs are a habit, I think.

without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.

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.

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