Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.

For a moment I had a strange intuition that just this, and in a real, profound sense, is life; and perhaps happiness even - love with a mixture of sadness, reverence, and silent knowledge.

To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and again and often forever.

On the steps is a machine-gun ready for action. The square is empty; only the streets that lead into it are jammed with people. It would be madness to go farther - the machine-gun is covering the square.

That is the remarkable thing about drinking: it brings people together so quickly, but between night and morning it sets an interval again of years.

It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.

It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.