"A familiar name on its own, however, does not carry its bearer far unless the talent is there, and the will to work."

"Why, he wondered, should he remember her suddenly, on such a day, watching the rain falling on the apple trees?"

"All whispers and echoes from a past that is gone teem into the sleeper's brain, and he is with them, and part of them."

"I felt rather exhausted, and wondered, rather shocked at my callous thought, why old people were sometimes such a strain. Worse than young children or puppies because one had to be polite."

"People who mattered could not take the humdrum world. But this was not the world, it was enchantment; and all of it was mine."

"From the very first, I knew that it would be so...I smiled to myself, and said, "That -- and none other."

"So you see, when war comes to one’s village, one’s doorstep, it isn’t tragic and impersonal any longer. It is just an excuse to vomit private hatred. That is why I am not a great patriot."

“If we were all suddenly somebody else.”

"…you guessed that somewhere, in heaven knew what country and what guise, there was someone who was part of your body and your brain, and that without him you were lost, a straw blown by the wind."

"If there’s one thing that makes a man sick, it’s to have his ale poured out of an ugly hand."

"How pleasant,' Dona said, peeling her fruit; 'the rest of us can only run away from time to time, and however much we pretend to be free, we know it is only for a little while - our hands and our feet are tied."

"You had to endure something yourself before it touched you."

"I would not be young again, if you offered me the world. But then I'm prejudiced.' 'You talk,' I said, 'as if you were ninety-nine.' 'For a woman I very nearly am,' she said. 'I'm thirty five."

"You have blotted out the past for me, far more effectively than all the bright lights of Monte Carlo."

"There was something rather blousy about roses in full bloom, something shallow and raucous, like women with untidy hair"

"People who travel are always fugitives."

"It's funny,' I noted in the diary, 'how often I seem to build a story around one sentence, nearly always the last one, too. The themes are a bit depressing but I just can't get rid of that."

"And, though there should be a world of difference between the smile of a man and the bared fangs of a wolf, with Joss Merlyn they were one and the same."

"He was young and ardent in a hundred happy ways."

"She's dearer than life itself, that's all I know."

"But the point is this Monsieur...the reason why Madame complains of you is not because of the immorality in itself; but because, so she tells me, you make immorality delicious."

"As I stood there,hushed and still,I could swear that the house was not an empty shell but lived and breathed as it had lived before."

"Maxim's voice, clear and strong, "Will someone take my wife outside?She is going to faint."

"She had contemplated life so long it had become indifferent to her."

"And he went on eating his marmalade as though everything were natural."

"She would have stood by Giles’s side, and shaken hands with people, a smile on her face. I could not do that. I had not the pride, I had not the guts. I was badly bred."

"...I will shed no more tears, like a spoilt child. For whatever happens we have had what we have had. No one can take that from us. And I have been alive, who was never alive before."

"....but in future keep the things that hurt to myself alone. They can be my secret indulgence."

"Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand."

"The feel of her own pillow, and of her own blankets reassured her. Both were familiar. And being tired was familiar too, it was a solid bodily ache, like the tiredness after too much jumping or cricket."

"But a lonely man is an unnatural man, and soon comes to perplexity. From perplexity to fantasy. From fantasy to madness."

"I did so obediently, and waited for her approval."

"Do you know so little about children, Monsieur Jean,' she asked, 'that you imagine, because they don't cry, therefore they feel nothing? If so, you're much mistaken."

"It doesn't make for sanity, does it, living with the devil."

"Tact was a quality unknown to her, discretion too, and because gossip was the breath of life to her this stranger must be served for her dissection."

"My afternoon had spoilt me for the hours that still remained,"

"Oh, God, I though, this is like two people in a play, in a moment the curtain will come down, we shall bow to the audience, and go off to our dressing-rooms."

"... the inevitable lorgnette, the enemy to other people's privacy."

"The house was a sepulcher, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins. There would be no resurrection."

"Anger and jealousy were things that could be conquered."

"I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people."

"..If we killed women for their tongues all men would be murderers."

"...The fact that it's black transforms it. Has the same effect on women that black stockings have on men."

"I was like a little scrubby schoolboy with a passion for a sixth-form prefect, and he kinder, and far more inaccessible."

"Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this."

"We are unusual and tragic and alive."

"I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love."

"But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them."

"Still though, I think if you're not self-obsessed, you're probably boring."

"All I ever wanted was to know what to do."