“Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.”

“She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.”

“8. You hate the political buisness of nationality. You hate everything, in politics and art and everything else, that is not genuine and deep and necessary. You don't have time for silly trivial things. You live seriously. You don't go to silly films, even if you want to; you don't read cheap newspapers; you don't listen to trash on the wireless and the telly; you don't waste time talking about nothing. You use your life.”

“I don't believe in God. And I certainly don't feel chosen.""I think you may be."I smiled dubiously. "Thank you.""It is not meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself.”

“No doubt our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.”

“I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.”

“I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.”