“But responsibility hardens the heart. It must.”

“The war had made a man of him! It had coarsened him and hardened him. There was no other way to look at it. It had made him reach a point at which he would no longer stand unbearable things.”

“I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone.”

“You can't kill a minuet de la coeur. You may shut up the music book... but surely the minuet-- the minuet itself is dancing itself away into the furthest stars, even as our minuet of the Hessian bathing places must be stepping itself still.”

“Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and madness.”

“So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars.”

“Higher than the beasts, lower than the angels, stuck in our idiot Eden.”