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.

Have you seen a room from which faith has gone? Like a marriage from which love has gone. And patience, patience everywhere like a fog.

What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?

Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?

He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.

It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old deathbed?

It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy--a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.