I'm too old to recover, too narrow to forgive myself.

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

One sits uncomfortably on a too comfortable cushion.

as one grows older, one realizes how little one knows about any relationship, or even about oneself.

Fashions in sin change.

It was an unspoken pleasure, that having come together so many years, ruined so much and repaired a little, we had endured.

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.