Mrs Thicknesse and I agreed that a business of his own was probably the only solution for him because he was obviously unemployable.

Love's blindness consists oftener in seeing what is not there than in seeing what is.

We turned on one another deep, drowned gazes, and exchanged a kiss that reduced my bones to rubber and my brain to gruel.

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?

"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."

Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.

We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other.