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.

I can’t tell you just how wonderful she is. I don’t want you to know. I don’t want any one to know.

If you are strong enough, there are no precedents.

Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh.

I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.

There has never been an American tragedy. There have only been great failures.