“I was too miserable to take much consolation just from feeling good for a moment in a welter of shudders and salted, bloodstained tears.”

“I think to feel this happy is to be miserable, to feel this much satisfaction is to burn.”

“You make me miserable. You really do, I want you to know that. Much as I love you, much as I need you, much as I can't exist without you, you make me miserable.”

“He had grieved for me, I'll give him that much. But then he is so good at grieving! He wears woe as others wear velvet; sorrow flatters him like the light of candles; tears become him like jewels.”

“But you're dead inside to me, you're cold and beyond my reach! It is as if I'm not here, beside you. And, not being here with you, I have the dreadful feeling that I don't exist at all. And you are as cold and distant from me as those strange modern paintings of lines and hard forms that I cannot love or comprehend, as alien as those hard mechanical sculptures of this age which have no human form. I shudder when I'm near you. I look into your eyes and my reflection isn't there . . . .”

“I know nothing, because I know too much, and understand not nearly enough and never will.”

“Of course the moment I saw the books, I was overcome with pleasure. This always happens with me. I feel foolishly safe with books which can be a mistake.”