We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the lives they lead.

It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.

The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger. Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.