I want men to admire me, but that's a trick you learn at school--a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire.

Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven't even got a self to express.

It's a good world if you don't weaken.

A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.

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

Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.

She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.