I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.

To create souls in men, to create fine happiness and fine despair she must remain deeply proud - proud to be inviolate, proud also to be melting, to be passionate and possessed.

Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

Reporting the extreme things as if they were the average things will start you on the art of fiction.

the growth of intimacy is like that. First one gives off his best picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humour. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and a third – before long the best lines cancel out – and the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the pictures have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture. We must be satisfied with hoping that such fatuous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates are accepted as true

but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game