A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.

Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.

for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.

Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!

I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way.