“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”

“He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual women, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from the outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”

“It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone you loved him and when you had nothing else to give you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use it changed nothing it did not produce more chocolate it did not avert the child's death of her own but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper...What mattered were individual relationships and a completely helpless gesture an embrace a tear a word spoken to a dying man could have value in itself.”

“Listen. The more men you’ve had, the more I love you. Do you understand that?”

“The more men you've had, the more I love you.”

“His mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.”

“Tell me, what did you think of me before that day I gave you that note?”He did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her. It was even a sort of love-offering to start off by telling the worst.“I hated the sight of you,” he said. “I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobble-stone.”