The essence of wisdom is to know when to be doing, and when it’s useless even to try
The gods do not visit you to remind you what you know already.
At breakfast!’ said Louise in an awed voice. ‘A man who can read poetry at breakfast would be capable of anything.
Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive.
There are few men more superstitious than soldiers. They are, after all, the men who live closest to death.
Silence then, and the scent of apple trees, and the nightmare sense of grief that comes when a man wakes again to feel a loss he has forgotten in sleep.
I had always been content to know that there was more in the living world than we could hope to understand.
Every man carries the seed of his own death, and you will not be more than a man. You will have everything; you cannot have more…
By the time that adorable steak and I had become one flesh I could have taken on the whole Valmy clan singlehanded.
Well, what was luck for if it was never to be tempted?
…kissing me with a violence that was terrifying and yet, somehow, the summit of all my tenderest dreams.