Nothing fails like failure

Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die.

Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.

And there isn't any way that one can get rid of the guilt of having a nice body by saying that one can serve society with it, because that would end up with oneself as what? There simply doesn't seem to be any moral place for flesh.

There are some people who cannot get onto a train without imagining that they are about to voyage into the significant unknown; as though the notion of movement were inseparably connected with the notion of discovery, as though each displacement of the body were a displacement of the soul.

Scenery can be a violent stimulant.

I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.