And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.

How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

When we are not sure, we are alive.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.

She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy.

Cruel men cry easily at the cinema.