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

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

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

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

What must novel dialogue . . . really be and do? It must be pointed, intentional, relevant. It must crystallize situation. It must express character. It must advance plot. During dialogue, the characters confront one another. The confrontation is in itself an occasion. Each one of these occasions, throughout the novel, is unique.

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.