The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief.

I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love--it's being unhappy together.

It is the storytellers task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.