You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.

We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't.

Try to be better than yourself.

Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.

When ideas come, I write them; when they don't come, I don't.