Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.

A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.

There is a stage in any misery when the victim begins to find a deep satisfaction in it.

No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.

From so much of this seriously-intended pornography there rises, even when it is lewdly or boisterously comic, the acrid smell, unmistakable, of self-dislike.

Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.

In Europe, war is a disease which has been in the family for generations: no one is surprised when it makes another leap. Even the patient only attends to it with part of his mind.