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He liked slim books which he could slip into his overcoat pocket and leave there unread for months. What was the point of a book if you couldn’t carry it around with you as a theoretical defence against boredom?

But we do not normally mistake progressions of weakness, the loss of the simple capacity to escape, for the onset of love. p. 17

The claim that every man kills the thing he loves seemed to him a wild guess compared with the near certainty of a man turning into the thing he hates.

In the eight years since his father’s death, Patrick’s youth had slipped away without being replaced by any signs of maturity, unless the tendency for sadness and exhaustion to eclipse hatred and insanity could be called ‘mature’.

Above all, he wanted to stop being a child without using the cheap disguise of becoming a parent.

No man is an island — although one’s known a surprising number who own one.

When a man of my father’s wealth dies of cancer, you know they haven’t found a cure.

Even if my country remains at war with yours . . . remember ... I am not your enemy.

Some temptations cannot be fought. One must close one's mind and fly from them.

Hell is that state where one has ceased to hope.

You are extraordinarily attractive to women. And your greatest charm is that you do not realise it.

I can love a stone, Govinda, and a tree or a piece of bark. These are things and one can love things. But one cannot love words. … Also with this great teacher, the thing to me is of greater importance than the words; his deeds and life are more important to me than his talk, the gesture of his hand is more important to me than his opinions. Not in speech or thought do I regard him as a great man, but in his deeds and life.