She was an expert at the art of sudden appearance.

You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.

…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.

You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield) “But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.

If I had to be anything," he told her, "I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.

Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.