What frightened him, and kept him more than ever on his knees, was the knowledge that, once having fallen, nothing would be easier than to fall again. Having possessed Esther, the carnal man awoke, seeing the possibility of conquest everywhere.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did-which was to hide.

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.

The future is like heaven-everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.

He loved this street [42nd Street], not for the people or the shops but for the stone lions that guarded the great main building of the Public Library, a building filled with books and unimaginably vast, and which he had never yet dared to enter.

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

It had been from the first her great mistake-to meet him, to marry him, to love him as she so bitterly had. Looking at his face, it sometimes came to her that all women had been cursed from the cradle; all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.