Not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.

He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.

What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?

i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.

For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.

I’ll wait for you. Come back. The words were not meaningless, but they didn’t touch him now. It was clear enough - one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion. Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word.

When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience- if only he had had them both at once- would surely have seen them both through.