I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant – impossible socially, but full-scale – and that it’s the knockings and baterrings we sometimes hear in each other...

Looking back at a repetition of empty days, one sees that monuments have sprung up. Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie: when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.

A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.

She posed as being more indolent than she felt, for fear of finding herself less able than she could wish.

He feels spikes everywhere and rushes to impale himself.

But Miss Pym gave an impression, somehow, of having been attacked from within.

One’s sentiments — call them that — one’s fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power.

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and...

Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

Darling, I don’t want you; I’ve got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don’t want the whole of anyone…. What you want is the whole of me-isn’t it, isn’t it?-and...

And because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for herself a particular doom of exclusion. Something of the trees in their intimacy...