Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.

Once a secret society establishes itself within an open society, there is no end to the hideous mistrust it must cause.

the reward for total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it.

There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.

The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved.

The childhood of the individual and the race is full of fears, and panic-stricken attempts to avert what is feared by placating the gods with painful sacrifices.

There is no escape from mystery. It is the character of our being.