I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.

Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.

The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.