“I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.”

“Embryos are like photograph film," said Mr. Foster waggishly, as he pushed open the second door. "They can only stand red light." And in effect the sultry darkness into which the students now followed him was visible and crimson, like the darkness of closed eyes on a summer's afternoon.”

“In the world of ideas everything was clear in life all was obscure, embroiled.”

“My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.”

“Not quite. I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feel that I've got something important to say and the power to say it—only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power.”

“Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence — either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous ‘embarkation’ and heroic conquest, or else to annihilate the persona and transcend the ego in an obscure rapture of sensuality, a frenzy of romantic passion, more creditably, in the mutual charity of the perfect marriage.”

“Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian's trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there's really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There's no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence.”