Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.

I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.

There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.

As long as one suffers one lives.

What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?

I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.

I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.

What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.

Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.

Waste no time to compare yourself with others. Find your soul.

A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.

The greatest conquest is the courage to be yourself.

I happy am, if well with you.

What's breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank?

Blessed be those souls who are glad! They are a salve for sorrow and fatigue. A sun in days of darkness, a joy in sorrow, a ray of heaven shining through the uncertainness of earth.

destruction is easy for humans but creation is too difficult.

Christianity is Platonism for the people.

As a child, the person I admired most in the world was Lana Turner! She seemed the epitome of glamour, and her glitzy surroundings so enviable, the opposite of my mother's extremely banal taste.

The success of any trap lies in its fundamental simplicity. The reverse trap by the nature of its single complication must be swift and simpler still.