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

"A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced."

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

"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 mask?"

"Suddenly watching her feet, so light and precise and mistress of his shuffle, I was in love again."

"Old age saves us from the realization of a great many fears."

"You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.'Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns."

"I had seen the flowers on her dress beside the canals in the north, she was indigenous like a herb, and I never wanted to go home."

"New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one."

"Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully."

"Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?"

"Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful."

"Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."

"Communists have committed great crimes but at least they have not stood aside like an established society and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate."

"Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity."

"Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates."

"Disappointment had to be postponed, hope kept alive as long as possible."

"I couldn't help wondering, is my husband so unattractive that no woman has ever wanted him? Except me, of course. I must have wanted him, in a way, once, but I've forgotten why, and I was too young to know what I was choosing."

"Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow," Aunt Augusta said, "like some people are only bearable under a sheet."

"In my school, he thought, they learn bitterness and frustration and how to grow old."

"Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast."

"I have no talent; it's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time."

"He wasn't a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people in this country, don't you, with bullets?"

"At the end of what is called the 'sexual life' the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything every disappointment every failure and every betrayal which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship."

"Why doesn't hatred kill desire? I would have given anything to sleep. I would have behaved like a schoolboy if I had believed in the possibility of a substitute. But there was a time when I had tried to find a substitute, and it hadn't worked."

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

"Reality in our century is not something to be faced."

"When there was a choice between love of a woman and hate of a man, her mind could cherish only one emotion, for her love might be a subject for laughter, but no one ever had ever mocked her hatred."

"The sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits - love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where the rice birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature."

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

"He disapproved, he didn't believe in girls drinking, he was full of the conventions of a generation older than himself. Of course one drank oneself, one fornicated, but one didn't lie with a friend's sister, and 'decent' girls were never squiffy."

"Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men."

"One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace."

"Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly and to the point people always seem to speak on the stage or on the screen, while in real life we stumble from phrase to phrase with endless repetition."

"He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch."

"He had been frightened and so he had been vehement."

"I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."

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

"Hate is a lack of imagination."

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

"Suffering is not increased by numbers. One body can contain all the suffering the world can feel."

"This was hell then, it wasn't anything to worry about: it was just his own familiar room."

"A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous."

"There are dreams which belong only partly in the unconscious; these are the dreams we remember on waking so vividly that we deliberately continue them, and so fall asleep again and wake and sleep and the dream goes on without interruption, with a thread of logic the pure dream doesn't possess."

"Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death...One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together."

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

"The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties."

"He had always despised people who thought about the past. To live was to leave behind, to be as free as a shipwrecked man who has lost everything."

"Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?"

"I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman."