“The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested so much within oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.”

“He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger. Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.”

“In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies.”

“The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.”

“Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant,superbly contemptuous of all that is notitself, and, as they very definition of passionimplies the impulse to freedom, it has a mightintimidiating power. It contains a challenge.It contains an unspeakable hope.”

“We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.”

“It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”