"It’s just life. You can’t beat life."

"I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it."

"There are people who carry decency and optimism around with them, who seem to cleanse every atmosphere they settle in, and you can't tell such people things, it is too disruptive."

"I despised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same."

"The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair."

"I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves."

"Now I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize."

"Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, were something happened, and then there are all the other places"

"Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently."

"She keeps on hoping from a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort."

"People who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one"

"And did I not think then, What nonsense it is to suppose one man so different from another when all that life really boils down to is getting a decent cup of coffee and room to stretch out in?"

"It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust."

"And at the end of his letter one terrible sentence. 'If I loved you I would have written differently."

"Everybody said to me back home, what do you want to go to Alaska for, and I said, because I've never been there, isn't that a good enough reason?"

"One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning."

"Love dies all the time, or at any rate it becomes distracted, overlaid--it might as well be dead."

"....Lived in curious but not unhappy isolation…subscribing to magazines nobody around them read, listening to programs on the national radio network which nobody around them listened to…"

"One's appreciation of meager comforts, it seems, depends on what misery one has gone through before getting them."

"For what was living with a man if it wasn't living inside his insanity?"

"None of us mattered to her, not me, or her critics or defenders. No more than bugs on a lampshade."

"The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust."

"Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire."

"So what about me? Would I always have to find a high horse? The moral relish, the rising above, the being in the right, which can make me flaunt my losses."

"He seemed happy. She thought that she seldom concerned herself about Laurence’s being happy. She wanted him to be in a good mood, so that everything would go smoothly, but that was not the same thing."

"A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken its undeniable shape."

"He could no more describe the feeling he got from her than you can describe a smell. It's like the scorch of electricity. It's like burnt kernels of wheat. No, it's like a bitter orange. I give up."

"There were differences never to be mended, a word or an act never to be forgiven, a barrier never to be washed away."

"You would think that Rosemary would understand that. She should have understood what such a choice said - that Karin was not to be made happy, amends were not possible, forgiveness was out of the question."

"Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle— And hoping It will reach Japan."

"What he carried with him, all he carried with him, was a lack, something like a lack of air, of proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever."

"A certain kind of seriousness in a girl could cancel out looks"

"My need for love had gone underground, like a canny toothache."

"Half my concern in love became how to disguise love, to make it harmless and merry."

"Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant."

"If this were fiction, as I said, it would be too much, but it is true."

"He takes up too much room, on the divan and in one's mind. It is simply impossible for me, in his presence, think of anything but him."

"It is all about a girl who is more interested in politics than in love... the Russian censors will not let it be published and the world outside will not want it because it is so Russian."

"You would think as you get older your mind would fill up with what they call the spiritual side of things, but mine just seems to get more and more practical, trying to get something settled."

"The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity."

"In your life there are a few places, or maybe only one place, where something has happened. And then there are the other places, which are just other places."

"She hated to hear the word "escape" used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about."

"He liked her not knowing. I could tell. He liked her not knowing. Her ignorance woke a pleasure that melted on his tongue, like a lick of toffee."

"Do you ever think that there used to be more sensible explanations about things than there are now?"

"She did not have time to wonder about his being late. He died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood out in front of the hardware store... He had not even had time to get into the store..."

"He says the pills he's got her on will keep her from sinking too low. How low is too low, Roy thinks, and when can you tell?"

"Life is always so full. Getting and spending we lay waste to our powers. Why do we let ourselves be so busy and miss doing things we should have, or would have, liked to do?"

"People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life."

"They spoke like caricatures, it was unbearable."

"It was comparable to getting sick from bad ventilation"