Love was a terrible thing. You poisoned it and stabbed at it and knocked it down into the mud - well down - and it got up and staggered on, bleeding and muddy and awful. Like - like Rasputin.

Life if curious when reduced to its essentials

Cold - cold as truth, cold as life. No, nothing can be as cold as life.

For the first time she had dimly realized that only the hopeless are starkly sincere and that only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy--even some of the bitter and dangerous voluptuousness of misery.

Stephan was secretive and a liar, but he was a very gentle and expert lover. She was the petted, cherished child, the desired mistress, the worshipped, perfumed goddess. She was all these things to Stephan - or so he made her believe.

Next week, or next month, or next year I will kill myself. But I might as well last out my month's rent, which has been paid up.

All of a writer that matters is in the book or books. It is idiotic to be curious about the person.