The trouble with treating people as equals is that the first thing you know they may be doing the same thing to you.

You can make a sordid thing sound like a brilliant drawing-room comedy. Probably a fear we have of facing up to the real issues. Could you say we were guilty of Noel Cowardice?

What baffles me is the comfort people find in the idea that somebody dealt this mess. Blind and meaningless chance seems to me so much more congenial - or at least less horrible. Prove to me that there is a God and I will really begin to despair.

Let us hope, I prayed, that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.

"You don't believe in God," I said to Stein. "God is a word banging around in the human nervous system. He exists about as much as Santa Claus." "Santa Claus has had a tremendous influence, exist or not." "For children." "Lots of saints have died for God with a courage that's hardly childish." "That's part of the horror. It's all a fantasy. It's all for nothing."

Are you pro- or anti-macassar?

... it is a fact universally acknowledged that a husband is the most ridiculous thing on earth, except for a bachelor.