“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”

“Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.”

“The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.”

“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”

“We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generation...”

“There is a deep foundation of my being which knows not of time and change and is still and ever with Hartley, in that good place where we once were.”

“I have felt more passion with less comfort elsewhere: the mysterious deep half-blind preferences of human beings for each other, the quick probing tentacles that seek in the dark, why one in...”

“Everything is full of gods, cousin James once said, quoting somebody.”

“We are all potentially demons to each other, but some close relationships are saved from this fate.”