What he liked he despised for being likable.

And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.

His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz — everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. . . .

It galled him that anybody should think him inferior.

Invincible ignorance always upset him, even though he knew he should just laugh at it.

There was something about such reflex stupidity that never failed to irritate him.

She had a certain way of looking at life which he took as a personal offense.

At this period of his existence, meat and blood, entrails, and all that had ever lived and breathed disgusted him as food, for an animal dies in pain just as man does, and it repelled him to be digesting death's agony.

She sounded angry. That was the way she'd been as long as he'd known her. If she became ill, it irritated her. She was annoyed by sickness. She seemed to regard it as a personal affront.

After another moment's silence she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason.

Passion paralyzes good taste.

What amused him most was another human's discomfort.

He was permanently impressed by the most irrelevant banalities and impossible to impress with real novelty, meaning, or conflict. And he was too moronic to be properly self-loathing — so it was my duty to loathe him instead.

Ill-timed admiration is enough to enrage a saint.