Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child.

Then a strange thing happened. She turned to him and smiled, and as he saw her smile every rag of anger and hurt vanity dropped from him — as though his very moods were but the outer ripples of her own, as though emotion rose no longer in his breast unless she saw fit to pull an omnipotent controlling thread.

People living alone get used to loneliness.

They were smiling at each other as if this was the beginning of the world.

Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour.

Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect—you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them.

We haven’t met for many years, said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be. "Five years next November." The automatic quality set us all back at least another minute.