I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the moulting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangerie. I know now I was in the throes of some small glandular crisis, a sublimated bilious attack, a flick from the whip of melancholia, but then it was terrifying...nameless...

I like old people when they have aged well.

When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts.

One ... aspect of the case for World War II is that while it was still a shooting affair it taught us survivors a great deal about daily living which is valuable to us now that it is, ethically at least, a question of cold weapons and hot words.

I cannot count the good people I know who to my mind would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers.

It is hard and perhaps impossible for many people to recognize the difference between innocence and naiveté.

The things men come to eat when they are alone are, I suppose, not much stranger than the men themselves.... A writer years ago told me of living for five months on hen mash.