When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, loyalty, pity.

God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.

A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.

She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy.

Death never mattered at those times - in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the wathchign her torch trail across to the opposite side of the common like the tail-light of a low car driving away.

A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.