“I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.”

“One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.”

“Of course,' I said, 'you know her so much better than I ever did.'In some ways,' he said gloomily, and I knew he was thinking of the very ways in which I had known her the best.”

“Why are some of us, he wondered, unable to love success or power or great beauty? Because we feel unworthy of them, because we feel more at home with failure? He didn't believe that was the reason. Perhaps one wanted the right balance, just as Christ had, the legendary figure whom he would have liked to believe in. 'Come unto me all ye that travail are and heavy laden.' Young as the girl was at that August picnic she was heavily laden with her timidity and shame. Perhaps he had merely wanted her to feel that she was loved by someone and so he began to love her himself. It wasn't pity, any more than it had been pity when he fell in love with Sarah pregnant by another man. He was there to right the balance. That was all.”

“I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.”

“When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.”

“When I tried to remember her voice saying, 'Don't worry,' I found I had no memory for sounds. I couldn't imitate her voice. I couldn't even caricature it: when I tried to remember it, it was anonymous - just any woman's voice.The process of forgetting her had set in. We should keep gramophone records as we keep photographs.”