... the stomach is near the heart and one appetite pricks on another.

A nation has honor precisely as it has fleas - on this or that body. The statesman who talks of honor - unless he means something else, quite different - is a rogue.

Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve -- or to corrupt -- civilization, and are obliged to use them.

Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.

Failures to love are irremediable and irredeemable.

Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit.

What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved?