Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.

Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.

You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!