"Where ignorance is bliss, it's foolish to be wise."

Bliss

"What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly by a feeling of bliss -absolute bliss!- as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe? ...

Oh, is there no way you can express it without being drunk and disorderly? How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?"

A Married Man's Story

"She turns away, pulls the other red sock off the baby, sits him up, and begins to unbutton him behind. I wonder if that little soft rolling bundle sees anything, feels anything? Now she turns him over on her knee, and in this light, his soft arms and legs waving, he is extraordinarily like a young crab. A queer thing is I can't connect him with my wife and myself -I've never accepted him as ours. Each time when I come into the hall and see the perambulator I catch myself thinking: 'H'm, someone has brought a baby!' […] The truth is, that though one might suspect her of strong maternal feelings, my wife doesn't seem to me the type of woman who bears children in her body. […] At any rate, isn't it a trifle indecent to feel like this about one's wife? Indecent or not, one has these feelings."

[…]

"And nobody is going to come behind her, to take her in his arms, to kiss her soft hair, to lead her to the fire and to rub her hands warm again. Nobody is going to call her or to wonder what she is doing out there. And she knows it. And yet, being a woman, deep down, deep down, she really does expect the miracle to happen; she really could embrace that dark, dark deceit, rather than live -like this."

[…]

"Why do people stay together? Putting aside 'for the sake of the children', and 'the habit of years' and 'economic reasons' as lawyers' nonsense -it's not much more- if one really does try to find out why it is that people don't leave each other, one discovers a mystery. It is because they can't; they are bound. And nobody on earth knows what are the bonds that bind them except those two."