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.

The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.

To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.

confession ran in the family.

Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.

We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling.

People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.