"I’m not sentimental, I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last; the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t."

"Being alone in body and spirit begets loneliness, and loneliness begets more loneliness."

"Long ago, long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more."

"In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day."

"I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life."