“That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.”

“Maud considered. She said, 'In every age, there must be truths people can't fight - whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we've modified it. We aren't really free to suppose - to imagine - he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. In particulars, surely - but not in the large plan -”

“I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.”

“Julian was good at being in love. But he was clever enough to know that what he really liked about being in love was the state of unconsummated tension... One had to believe that these lovely creatures were, in potentia, the longed for intimate friend from whom nothing need be hidden, by whom everything would be understood, forgiven and admired. But Julian was clever and observant enough to see that love was at its most intense before it was reciprocated.”

“She leads you on and baffles you,” said Beatrice. “She wants you to know and not to know. She took care to write down that the box was there. And she buried it.”

“You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.”

“Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.”