Nothing any good isn't hard.

I want to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally.

that voice was a deathless song.

Many nights he lay there dreaming awake of secret cafés in Mont Marte, where ivory women delved in romantic mysteries with diplomats and soldiers of fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian waltzes and the air was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight and adventure.

There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.

unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories

She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.