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?

A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.

I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.

God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed - that is the meaning of evolution.

Sentimentality - that's what we call the sentiment we don't share.

Sometimes I get so tired of trying to convince him that I love him and shall love him for ever. He pounces on my words like a barrister and twists them. I know he is afraid of that desert which would be around him if our love were to end, but he can't realise that I feel exactly the same. What he says aloud, I say to myself silently and write it here.

It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.