“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.”

“Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.”

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”

“Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.”

“France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter - it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.”

“There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still.”

“Sometimes I don't know if Zelda isn't a character that I created myself.”