Status Updates From The End of the Affair

"I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make-believe that love lasted, I was happy – I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck."

"...for aren't lovers nearly always innocent? They have committed no crime, they are certain in their own minds that they have done no wrong, 'as long as no one but myself is hurt', the old tag is ready on their lips, and love, of course, excuses everything – so they believe, and so I used to believe in the days when I loved."

"I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never begin to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days."

"If a woman is in one's thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night."

"She had always called me 'you'. 'Is that you?' on the telephone, 'Can you? Will you? Do you?' so that I imagined, like a fool, for a few minutes at a time, there was only one 'you' in the world and that was me."

"I thought with bitterness and envy: if one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it."

“And there – in that phrase – the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love, I would be another man: I would never have lost love.”

'To all pimps and whores a merry syphilis and a happy gonorrhea.'

"How twisted we humans are, and yet they say a God made us; but I find it hard to conceive of any God who is not as simple as a perfect equation, as clear as air."

"Henry was important, but important rather as an elephant is important, from the size of his department; there are some kinds of importance that remain hopelessly damned to unseriousness."

"To me comfort is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort."