Human behavior is a series of lunges, of which, it is sometimes sensed, the direction is inevitable.

As it is I’m a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don’t understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is going to be everybody’s albatross.

The worst thing about love between human beings is that when you are prepared to love them they don’t want it; when they do its you who can’t bear the idea.

Reason finally holds a gun at its head – and does not always miss.

Two people do not lose themselves at the identical moment, or else they might find each other, and be saved. It is not as simple as that.

There are moments when the eyes flow into each other. Then the souls are wrapped around each other across a distance.

If I have not lost my mind I can sometimes hear it preparing to defect.

It was Sunday, and Mumma had gone next door with Lena and the little ones. Under the pepper tree in the yard Pa was sorting, counting, the empty bottles he would sell back: the bottles going clink clink as Pa stuck them in the sack. The fowls were fluffing in the dust and sun: that crook-neck white pullet Mumma said she would hit on the head if only she had the courage to; but she hadn’t.

In general,′ Voss replied, ’it is necessary to communicate without knowledge of the language.

They walked on rather aimlessly. He hoped she wouldn’t notice he was touched, because he wouldn’t have known how to explain why. Here lay the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality.