If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.

We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that is where we really belong.

I write about situations that are common, universal might be more correct, in which my characters are involved and from which only faith can redeem them, though often the actual manner of the redemption is not immediately clear. They sin, but there is no limit to God's mercy and because this is important, there is a difference between not confessing in fact, and the complacent and the pious may not realize it.

I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.

Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.

Who knows whether there may not be a moment in childhood when the world changes forever, like making a face when the clock strikes?