A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.

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.

At one with the One, it didn't mean a thing besides a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.

It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.

How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.

The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.

If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.