I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.

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.

. . . it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.

All nationalistic distinctions - all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect - are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.

If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.

By revolution we become more ourselves, not less.