“He was as much a victim of hope as I had been.”

“Too much mercy... often resulted in further crimes which were fatal to innocent victims who need not have been victims if justice had been put first and mercy second.”

“The only guilt of the victims, he thought, had been that they accepted it as guilt.”

“He asked himself whether it could be that he was in love with her, and then hoped he was not; hoped it not so much for his own sake as for that of the amatory passion itself. If this was love, love had been overrated.”

“I was clinging to all that had been and, in an ideal world, all that we had hoped for. He, he wanted out.”

“As I remember his laugh, there was nothing mad about it, it was more like the laugh of someone who has been the victim of a practical joke, a farce in which he had believed until suddenly he realized his folly.”