“For God's sake stop making people in your image. Harry was real. He wasn't just your hero and my lover. He was Harry. He was in a racket. He did bad things. What about it? He was the man we knew.”

“The old man in the beard he felt convinced was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn't it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damnation with them rather than be saved alone?”

“I felt for the first time the premonitory of loneliness.It was all fantastic, and yet, and yet...He might be a poor lover, but I was a poor man. He had in his hand the infinite riches of respectability”

“There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.”

“He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted - to be a saint.”

“It didn't matter anyway...he wasn't made for peace, he couldn't believe in it. Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust.”

“I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”