Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie.

Life is too short to eat vanilla ice cream and dance with boring men.

In bed that night with the lights out and the cool room swimming with moonlight, Anthony lay awake and played with every minute of the day like a child playing in turn with each one of a pile of long-wanted Christmas toys.

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.

And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.

Your life on earth will be, as always, the interval between two significant glances in a mundane mirror.

I feared so-you're sentimental. You're not like me. I'm a romantic little materialist. 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.

I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses—

We drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.