Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and madness.

And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me.

[W]e are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other.

Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.

You have to wait together - for a week, for a year, for a lifetime, before the final intimate conversation may be attained ... and exhausted. So that ... That in effect was love.

It was an odd friendship, but the oddnesses of friendships are a frequent guarantee of their lasting texture.

He wouldn't write a letter because he couldn't without beginning it 'Dear Sylvia' and ending it 'Yours sincerely' or 'truly' or 'affectionately.' He's that sort of precise imbecile. I tell you he's so formal he can't do without all the conventions there are and so truthful he can't use half of them.