Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet … - John Fowles

I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, or for myself, because only extroverts cry twice; but I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.

We were equally tired, in mid-century, of cold sanity and hot blasphemy; of the over-cerebral and of the over-faecal; the way out lay somewhere else. Words had lost their power, either for good or for evil; still hung, like a mist, over the reality of action, distorting, misleading, castrating; but at least since Hitler and Hiroshima they were seen to be a mist, a flimsy superstructure.

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.

The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.