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

Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

Death was far more certain than God.

Any man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.

Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.

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

That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.