If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise you are insulting God as well as defying Him, don't you think?

I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

But what do you believe? I don't just mean religion. What are you sure of?" "That once I was not and that now I am. That one day I shall no longer be.

I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

Can we ever break free of the devices and desires of our own hearts? Might not our conscience be telling us what we most want to hear?

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.

For me, the dead remain dead. If I couldn't believe that, I don't think I could go on living.