“Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. This is why all the world is a stage.”

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life’s major mysteries.

I don’t think I can marry, I’m not fit for it, I’m not real enough. That’s the trouble. I’m a puppet that’s realised what’s wrong with itself and it’s horrible. I’m propped up somewhere all alone, watching the real people go past. I’m propped up crying in a corner.

I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this.

That doesn’t sound like you, you ride every wave. There is one that will drown me

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.

Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all.

I feel I’m at the end of something – everything is going to be different – and terrible.

An experience is richest not talked of.

We can only learn to love by loving.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.

To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare’s, the Cornish sea.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.

Love in marriage is more than just a feeling or an emotion; it is a choice.

Because of the vulgar advent, I decided to give way and, by dark and cryptic sentences, tell of the causes of the future mutation of mankind; especially the most urgent ones, and the ones I perceived, and in a manner that would not upset their fragile sentiments.

A movie doesn’t have to do everything. A movie just has to do a couple of things. If it does those things well and gives you a cool night at the movies, an emotion, that’s good enough.

I don’t try and be dark, but there are obviously darker emotions that I want to capture sometimes.

What are the lessons to be learned from this journey of the mind through the universe? That humans are emotionally fragile, perennially gullible, hopelessly ignorant masters of an insignificantly small speck in the cosmos. Have a nice day.

It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.

It’s an indication of how cynical our society has become that any kind of love story with a sad theme is automatically ridiculed as sentimental junk.

Through the feigned fury of divine emotion, the wife of the great one will be badly wronged. Judges, wishing to condemn such a doctrine, the victim will be sacrificed to the ignorant people.