Недовольство было днями вежливого молчания, нежность была словом вежливой приязни.

в кабинете сидел сломленный человек, которому не суждено было вновь стать таким, каким он был.

Главное — разрушение нас самих, того, что мы делаем.

It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.

...she was, as she had said, almost happy with her despair; she would live her days out quietly, drinking a little more, year by year, numbing herself against the nothingness her life had become. He was glad she had that, at least; he was grateful that she could drink.

...he knew it was a feeling compounded of emotions so deep and intense that they could not be acknowledged because they could not be lived with.

It was a triumph in a way, but one of which he always remained amusedly contemptuous, as if it were a victory won by boredom and indifference.

They revealed that knowledge by grammatical usage: they progressed from the perfect—"We have been happy, haven't we?"—to the past—"We were happy—happier than anyone, I think"—and at last came to the necessity of discourse.

They wanted only to be left alone, to be themselves; and, wanting this, they knew they would not be left alone and they suspected that they could not be themselves.

Oh, how proper we seem to ourselves when we have no reason to be improper!

Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.

"I am not ill," she said. And she added in a voice that was calm, speculative, and almost uninterested, "I am desperately, desperately unhappy."

...everything you say is a fact, but none of it is true.

As he worked on the room, and as it began slowly to take a shape, he realized that for many years, unknown to himself, he had had an image locked somewhere within him like a shamed secret, an image that was ostensibly of a place but which was actually of himself. <...> ...as he repaired his furniture and arranged it in the room, it was himself that he was slowly shaping, it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself that he was making possible.

...an epiphany of knowing something through words that could not be put in words...

They were nervous and cautiously gay.

Her voice was thin and high, and it held a note of hopelessness that gave a special value to every word she said.

Years later it was to occur to him that in that hour and a half on that December evening of their first extended time together, she told him more about herself than she ever told him again. And when it was over, he felt that they were strangers in a way that he had not thought they would be, and he knew that he was in love.

You, too, are cut out for failure; not that you'd fight the world. You'd let it chew you up and spit you out, and you'd lie there wondering what was wrong. Because you'd always expect the world to be something it wasn't, something it had no wish to be. The weevil in the cotton, the worm in the beanstalk, the borer in the corn. You couldn't face them, and you couldn't fight them; because you're too weak, and you're too strong. And you have no place to go in the world.

On the one hand, you're capable of work, but you're just lazy enough so that you can't work as hard as the world would want you to. On the other hand, you're not quite so lazy that you can impress upon the world a sense of your importance.