...You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good.

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.

Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.

Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.

For that matter, thinking of one's self as exceptional is probably more the rule than not.

[Children] would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.

My own apathy is bone chilling.