You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.

However, withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I've always been. Hard to explain that to the young. we may look truly reptilian, but we're not a separate tribe.

A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.

It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.

Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.

The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.