O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.

So much of life [is] a putting-off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing [is] ever lost by delay.

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.

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

Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.

O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.

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.