They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.

It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there.

Cynicism is cheap - you can buy it at any Monoprix store - it's built into all poor-quality goods.

I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.

A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

They haven't left us much to believe, have they? — even disbelief. I can't believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being.

Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.