“Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.”

“Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.”

“What they had both thought was safety proved to have been the camouflage of an enemy who works in terms of friendship, trust and pity.”

“If one knew, he wondered, the facts,would one have to pity even the planets? If one reached what they called the heart of the matter?”

“When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

“It was not merely that his brother was dead. His brain, too young to realize the full paradox, wondered with an obscure self- pity why it was that the pulse of his brother's fear went on and on, when Francis was now where he had always been told there was no more terror and no more--darkness.”

“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.”