In a world in which success was the only virtue, he had resigned himself to failure... He was just not equipped to excel.

We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling up a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.
How many times did you know someone who refracted your own light to you? People were more often torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?

We are adrift in a tense and joyless world that is falling apart at an accelerated rate. No way to arrest the disintegration that menaces from every side.

The saddest thing about love is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten. I know that is an unbearable truth, but all truth is unbearable.

He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

Right and wrong aren't dropped from the sky. We make them. Against misery. Invariably, misery follows their disobedience. Not our own, often at first not our own.

The truth is, you're monstrously selfish. You're a coward. You don't care about right or wrong; you worship nothing except your own worst instincts.