Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.

Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days.

We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us.

...every monologue sooner or later becomes a discussion.