“Don't try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We're all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat - and the boat is perpetually sinking.”

“Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.”

“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”

“In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.”

“That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.”

“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.”

“He wished to ignore all but here and now, to be as though he had only just entered the world and were destined to be eternal. Bus his memory survived, even though he never deliberately made use of it; and though the things which had been Isabels were destoryed, he could not guard against chance reminders. Chance had found many gaps in his defenses this morning.”