...one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.

There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.

I like France, where everybody thinks he's Napoleon--down here everybody thinks he's Christ.

i'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires

Most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don't in the beginning.

Your first most typical figure in any new place turns out to be a bluff or a local nuisance.

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