“A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.”

“Every Joke is a Tiny Revolution”

“The aim of the joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.”

“Literature, especially poetry, and lyric poetry most of all, is a kind of family joke, with little or no value outside its own language-group.”

“He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve.”

“The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.”

“And the whole huge town of a million people was locked in a sort of violent inertia, a nightmare of noise without movement.”