There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?

Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.

The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement.

Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.