So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

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

If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.

Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.

To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honor - the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two.

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?

Death was far more certain than God.