to grow old is to have taken away, one by one, all gifts of life, the food and wine, the music and the company. ... the gods unloose, one by one, the mortal fingers that cling to the edge of the table.

Any marriage worth the name is no better than a series of beginnings - many of them abortive.

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.

... we do not remember people as they were. What we remember is the effect they had on us then, but we remember it through an emotion charged with all that has since happened to us.

The young are so much more vulnerable than the old - the stuff is still warm and malleable, it takes impressions.

She did not so much cook as assassinate food.

Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human.