Science, I am told, is making great strides, experimenting, groping after things which no sane man has ever dreamed of before – without being burned alive for it.

I believe in the devil, in the Powers of Darkness, Lawford, as firmly as I believe he and they are powerless – in the long run. They – what shall we say? – have surrendered their intrinsicality. You can just go through evil, as you can go through a sewer, and come out on the other side. A loathsome process too.

And I suffered the streaming light to fall upon me, as I gazed into my joy and triumph with a kind of severe nonchalance. But though my face under my three-cornered hat can have expressed only calmness and resolution, I knew in my heart that my thoughts were merely a thin wisp of smoke above the crater of a suppressed volcano.

The time’s gone by for sentiment and all that foolery. Mercy’s all very well but after all it’s justice that clinches the bargain.

Acquaintances, after all, are little else than a bad habit.

I know well that only the rarest kind of best can be good enough for the young.

It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness alike were really only appreciable with one’s legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.

As soon as they’re out of your sight, you are out of their mind.

Unless you were preternaturally busy and preoccupied, you simply couldn’t live on and on in a haunted house without being occasionally reminded of its ghosts.

They say death’s a going to bed; I doubt it; but anyhow life’s a long undressing. We came in puling and naked, and every stitch must come off before we get out again. We must stand on our feet in all our Rabelaisian nakedness, and watch the world fade.