You don't bless what you love...It's when you want to love and you can't manage it. You stretch out your hands and you say God forgive me that I can't love but bless this thing anyway...We have to bless what we hate...It would be better to love, but that's not always possible.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.

Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.

You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.' Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.

How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.

A man kept his character even when he was insane.