I think they're very attractive,' Abe agreed. 'I just don't think they're attractive, that's all.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to 'succeed'-and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills-domestic, professional and personal-then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.

When she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed like birds’ wings. After that everything was all right, everything was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to fall in love with her.

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!