At one with the One, it didn't mean a thing besides a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.

...and yet could swear it was just then that I fell in love. It wasn't, of course, simply the onions -- it was the sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable.

I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.

All good novelists have bad memories.

In the taxi I let my hand lie on her leg like a promise, but I had no intention of keeping my promise.

If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?

Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn't worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination ... then we fail. The wrong is in that failure even if we are the victims and not the executioners. Virtue is no excuse.