“If all good, respectable people had one face, I'd spit in it.”

“And I saw that all my life I had known that this was going to happen, and that I'd been afraid for a long time, I'd been afraid for a long time. There's fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world.”

“He had discovered that people who allow themselves to be blown about by the winds of emotion and impulse are always unhappy people.”

“There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.”

“But in the daytime it was all right. And when you'd had a drink you knew it was the best way to live in the world because anything might happen. I don't know how people live when they know exactly what's going to happen to them each day.”

“She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.”

“Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.”