Its typical of Mexico, of the whole human race perhaps — violence in favour of an ideal and then the ideal lost but the violence just going on.

It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old deathbed?

There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.

The argument of danger only applies to those who live in relative safety.

The problem of pretending to be alive.

No building was safe from the furniture, the pictures, the human beings that it would presently contain.

A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.