What a sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which everyone else is reading.

How sick one gets of being 'good', how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours; embody selfishness.

The difficulty about all this dying, is that you can’t tell a fellow anything about it, so where does the fun come in?

Sargy always had the capacities of a cormorant, so he is able to swallow her whole, not having to think about her as she is going down must make it easier.

Original sin is my only refuge, I was born bad and I never have recovered.

How sick one gets of being “good,” how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours; embody selfishness.

How heroic to be able to suppress one’s vanity to the extent of confessing that the game is too hard.

What one reads, or rather all that comes to us, is surely only of interest and value in proportion as we find ourselves therein, – form given to what was vague, what slumbered stirred to life.

The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape.

Destitution and excessive luxury develop apparently the same ideals, the same marauding attitude towards mankind, the intensity of struggle for material goods, – surely showing how perfect is the meeting of extremes.