Invisible

She's too sad to be beautiful. No one that sad can still be beautiful.

I have one very special quality, something that sets me apart from everyone else.
And what quality is that?
Patience

Жалость это такое ужасное, бесполезное чувство — ты должен закупорить ее в бутылку и спрятать глубоко в себе. Только ты достанешь ее для других, и сразу все испортится

You both love Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Hawthorne and Melville, Flaubert and Stendhal, but at that stage of your life you cannot stomach Henry James, while Gwyn argues that he is the giant of giants, the colossus who makes all other novelists look like pygmies.

I write poems, yes. And some book reviews for Spectator.
The undergraduate rag.
Everyone has to start somewhere.
Interesting...
Not terribly. Half the people I know want to be writers.

That's what friends are for. To share each other's pains, to help each other out.

Books should be treated with respect, even the ones that make us ill.

Pity is such an awful, useless emotion - you have to bottle it up and keep it to yourself. The moment you try to express it, it only makes things worse.

Fear is what drives us to take risks and extend ourselves beyond our normal limits.

Words aren't everything.

Better to be shy than arrogant, I suppose, better to blend in delicately than to intimidate everyone with your insufferable human perfection.

Never underestimate the importance of war. War is the purest, most vivid expression of the human soul.

Но досадный факт оставался фактом: в этом мире больше поэзии, чем справедливости.

When you're informed that a person likes you, your instinctive response is to like that person back.

Nobody can own another person.

Put something in the wrong place, and even though it is still there - quite possibly smack under your nose - it can vanish for the rest of time.

You can't feel guilty unless you think you've done something wrong.

Real love, she says, is when you get as much pleasure from giving pleasure as you do from receiving it.

Но лучше забыть о теории вероятности, когда дело касается действительности, и если что-то может не случиться, это не означает, что оно не случится на самом деле.