I wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal.

In thoughts one keeps a reserve of hope, in spite of everything. You cannot say good-bye in imagination. That is something you can only do in actuality.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

That was the trouble with experience; it taught you that most people were capable of anything, so that loyalty was never quite on firm ground -- or, rather, became a matter of pardoning offenses instead of denying their existence.

What you fear most will happen to you - that is the law.

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.