“...every monologue sooner or later becomes a discussion.”

“Sooner or later...one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”

“...and yet could swear it was just then that I fell in love. It wasn't, of course, simply the onions -- it was the sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable.”

“He was like a child with haemophilia: every contact drew blood.”

“Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.”

“There is an old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double.”

“He was filled with horror at the thought of what a child becomes, and what the dead must feel watching the change from innocence to guilt and powerless to stop it”