“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.”

“Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband.”

“If they should only be ill,' she said, 'there would be so many little things we could do for them. It does seem in a kind of a way an opportunity. I often think it is only when a man is ill that he...”

“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 that h...”

“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 th...”

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

“nights and days came and passedand summer and winterand the sun and the windand the rain.and it was good to be a little islanda part of the worldand a world of its ownall surrounded by the bright b...”

“When you drop a glass or a plate to the ground it makes a loud crashing sound. When a window shatters a table leg breaks or when a picture falls off the wall it makes a noise. But as for your heart...”

“A good friend of mine once said, "I have never met a bigot who was a reader as a child.”

“Dialogue is about freeing human beings from the beliefs and attitudes that make human beings miserable.”

“I still believe in man in spite of man. I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed, and perverted by the enemies of mankind. And I continue to cling to words because it is up t...”

“One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.”

“This is why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions 'why' and 'to what' grow real beaks and claws.”

“We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately (...) To games or needles, to some other person.”

“Memories are truths we have chosen.”