“I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten time...”

“He stared to sea. "I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I lived a selfish life. That is, ...”

“Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?''For fun?''Fun!' He pounced on the word. 'Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.”

“Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.”

“The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.""I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self.""You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray ...”

“Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.”

“Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that youve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you sa...”

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there i...”

“Let us not project our own spiritual limitations onto the modern world, for it is not the world which prevents us from being religious. The kind of world we live in shapes the manner and mode of ou...”

“The death of God left the angels in a strange position.”

“We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development part of...”

“Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous embarkation and heroic conquest, or...”

“He didn't know all that much about how the machinery worked anyway. Such knowledge was for specialists. In war, as in love, he was a fearless, happy-go-lucky adventurer.”

“If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.”