He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.
Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.
Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?
There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives.
Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song.