Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.

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 had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing.

Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?

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

You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.

You are all alike, you people. You never learn the truth--that God knows nothing.

She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy.

We are all resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

Nothing in life was as ugly as death.

One forgets the dead quite quickly; one doesn't wonder about the dead-what is he doing now, who is he with?

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil -- or else an absolute ignorance.

She couldn't avoid being serious about things she cared for, and happiness made her grave at the thought of all the things which might destroy it.

Perhaps because I'm feeling happier. Don't ask me why, Sarah. Happiness goes when you speak of it. (164)

Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.

If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another name?

disappointment had to be postponed, hope kept alive as long as possible;

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.

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 is the storyteller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.

But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.

I can't talk you in terms of time --your time and my time are different