“Her handwriting in these pencilled jottings, made forty-five years ago, is exactly as it is today: this makes me suspect, when I am not with her, that she is a closet intellectual.”

“When a woman reaches forty, she must wait twenty years for her husband to catch up.”

“Dame Sancho would be better if she cared less. I am her barometer- if a sigh escapes me, it is answered by a tear in her eye; I oft assume a gaiety to illume her dear sensibility with a smile- which twenty years ago almost bewitched me; and mark! after twenty years enjoyment, constitutes my highest pleasure!”

“Let her who is forty call herself forty; but if she can be young in spirit at forty, let her show that she is so.”

“…I was born lazy. I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can't go beyond possibility.”

“I suspect I only really liked her because she liked me first.”

“There's something special about her. When she helped me with her touch-"
"Exactly what was she touching that was so memorable for you?"
"Watch your mouth.”

“Her soul in the balance, my heart in her hands
I made her a widow, she made me a man.”

“All at once I loathed her, because she had hurt me. This girl! She had torn up my sonnet by Dowson, she had shown my telegram to everybody in the Columbia Buffet. She had made a fool of me at the beach. She suspected my virility, and her suspicion was the same as the scorn in her eyes. I watched her face and lips and thought how it would be a pleasure to strike her, send my fist with all force against her nose and lips.”

“At the base of her ankle is a deep, ugly scar she got when a car ran over her foot when she was six years old. That was in a small town in Bangladesh. Thus, even today, she hesitates superstitiously before crossing the road, and is painfully shy of walking distances. Her fears make her laughable. The scar is printed on her skin like a radiant star.”