“Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; argument an exchange of ignorance.”

“Character is made by what you stand for;reputation by what you fall for.”

“Men and women walked casually about as they did on the main floor, every now and then stopping one another, exchanging pleasantries or scraps of relevantly irrelevant information. Gossip.”

“In a time when nothing is more certain than change, the commitment of two people to one another has become difficult and rare. Yet, by its scarcity, the beauty and value of this exchange have only been enhanced.”

“Of course, there would always be arguments. That is the nature of Woman. They like the mutual exchange of dirty laundry, a bit of screaming, a bit of dramatics. Then an exchange of vows.”

“Every exchange making him feel like an idiot, making him draw his spine up straight and making him fiddle with his hair, and all he wanted to do was to see her naked on the floor. Not brutal, not unkind, enraptured.”

“The great prophetic work of the modern world is Goethe’s Faust, so little appreciated among the Anglo-Saxons. Mephistopheles offers Faust unlimited knowledge and unlimited power in exchange for his soul. Modern man has accepted that bargain. . . .I believe in what the Germans term Ehrfurcht: reverence for things one cannot understand. Faust’s error was an aspiration to understand, and therefore master, things which, by God or by nature, are set beyond the human compass. He could only achieve this at the cost of making the achievement pointless. Once again, it is exactly what modern man has done.”