“Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.”

“I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant - impossible socially, but full-scale - and that it's the knockings and baterrings we sometimes hear in each other that keeps our intercourse from utter banaility.”

“Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.”

“At Spezia when I am angry I go full of smoke inside, but when you make me angry I see everything.”

“The restaurant was waning, indifferently relaxing its illusion: for the late-comers a private illusion took its place. Their table seemed to stand on their own carpet; they had a sensation of custom, sedateness, of being inside small walls, as though dining at home again after her journey. She told him about her Mount Morris solitary suppers, in the middle of the library, the rim of the tray just not touching the base of the lamp... the fire behind her back softly falling in on its own ash-no it had not been possible to feel lonely among those feeling things.”

“The happy passive nature, locked up with itself like a mirror in an airy room, reflects what goes on but demands not to be approached.”

“But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?”