“The more bare a life is, the more we fear change.”

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

“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.”

“It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.”

“The more unstable life is the less one likes the small details to alter.”

“When we get to the end of human beings we have to delude ourselves into a belief in God, like a gourmet who demands more complex sauces with his food.”

“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.”