This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness.

She saw him the first day on board, and then her heart sank into her shoes as she realized at last how much she wanted him. No matter what his past was, no matter what he had done. Which was not to say that she would ever let him know, but only that he moved her chemically more than anyone she had ever met, that all other men seemed pale beside him.

Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on.

Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.

She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.

I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

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.