If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.

Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home.

Suddenly he was inside the radius of her perfume and kissing her breathlessly.

Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.

After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.