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.

They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.

To comfort me is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort.

You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?.

A ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system.

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.