Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.

The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it.

Every life viewed from the inside is a series of defeats.

Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.