That alas is the way it goes”; “Something we must rectify.” Paul, not Caro, would interpret the degree of meaning in their respective lots. That had been decided, as he sat speaking intimately of his life to the person most excluded from it – in order to readmit her to the intimacy, though not the life.

He had seen how people came a cropper by giving way to impulse. It was to his judiciousness, at every turn, that he owed the fact that nothing terrible had ever happened to him.

I have a superstition that if I talk about plot, it’s like letting sand out of a hole in the bottom of a bag.

Her eyes were enlarged and faded with discovering what, by common human agreement, is better undivulged.

When people say of their tragedies, ‘I don’t often think of it now,’ what they mean is it has entered permanently into their thoughts, and colors everything.

Occasion revived an illusion of discovery, as if one woke in a strange room to wonder afresh not only where but who one was; to shed assumptions, even certainties.

And the thread of her happiness was no stronger than the clasp of her fingers on his coat, no longer than this last mile of their journey.

Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they’re made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that was neither the moment nor the true self.

In England, life is a long process of composing oneself...

I have never suffered greatly... If you can reach fifty without a catastrophe, you’ve won. You’ve got away with it.