The taste of Scotch, though Guy didn’t much care for it, was pleasant because it reminded him of Anne. She drank Scotch, when she drank. It was like her, golden, full of light, made with...

The justice I have received, I shall give back.

One situation – maybe one alone – could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness.

Why should I put myself out for you?” and it was Anne’s eyes as she pushed her hair back and looked up at him on the lawn of her house where she planted crocuses. It...

For the hundredth time, he examined his face in the bathroom mirror, patiently touched every scratch with the styptic pencil, and repowdered them. He ministered to his face and hands objectively, as if they were...

Honestly, I don’t understand why people get so worked up about a little murder!

one blow in anger [would] kill, probably, a child from aged two to eight. Those over eight would take two blows to kill.

And everything was made of paper: sentences, pardons, pleas, bad records, demerits, proof of guilt, but never, it seemed, proof of innocence. If there were no paper, Carter felt, the entire judicial system would collapse...

But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or...

I had depressing thoughts that the theme, even though I had thought of it, was better than I was as a writer. Henry James or Thomas Mann could easily write it, but not I. ‘I’m...

What chance combination of shadow and sound and his own thoughts had created it?

He did look like an Italian of the worse type, though Vic didn’t think he was, and it was an insult to the Italian race to assume that he was. He resembled no particular race,...

I tell him his business, all business, is legalized throat-cutting, like marriage is legalized fornication.

My imagination functions much better when I don’t have to speak to people.

I like to drink when I travel. It enhances things, don’t you think?

He could feel the belligerence growing in Freddie Miles as surely as if his huge body were generating a heat that he could feel across the room.

I know you have it in you, Guy,” Anne said suddenly at the end of a silence, “the capacity to be terribly happy.

Honesty, for me, is usually the worst policy imaginable.