Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.

The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes.

Life is progressive, no matter what our intentions.

The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and ran into the corners of her body. She turned round and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it.