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?

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

Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.

She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.

Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.

It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.