“One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.”

“Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.”

“Was Mrs. Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people- there are many of them- who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling around them. Then they withdraw. When physical passion is involved, there is a definite name for such behaviour- flirting- and if carried far enough, it is punishable by law. But no law- not public opinion, even- punishes those who coquette with friendship, though the dull ache that they inflict, the sense of misdirected effort and exhaustion, may be as intolerable. Was she one of these?”

“There was something better in life than this rub­bish, if only he could get to it—love—nobility—big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend. . .”

“The affections are more reticent than the passions, and their expression more subtle.”

“But it was the stupidity of passion, which would rather have nothing than a little.”

“Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.”