Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.

I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.

God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed - that is the meaning of evolution.

Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.

One can't love humanity. One can only love people.

When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.

You cannot control what you love--you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead.