It is bitter to lose a friend to evil, before one loses him to death.

He looked as if he were anxiously balancing a large handful of tact, without quite knowing where to put it down.

There is truth and truth,’ said the priest of Delos. ‘It is true after its kind.

We are weary of ourselves, and have dreamed a king. If now the gods have sent us one, let us not ask him to be more than mortal.

I’m not prepared to accept a standard which puts the whole of my emotional life on the plane of immorality.

It had come to him that no one would ever look from these eyes but he: that among all the lives, numerous beyond imagination, in which he might have lived, he was this one, pinned to this single point of infinity; the rest always to be alien, he to be I.

Great anguish lies in wait for those who long too greatly.

Now for the first time he realized how important it had been not to admit any alternative to the hard, decent, orthodox choice which need not be regarded as a choice at all; how important not to be different.

They say women forget the pain of childbirth. Well, they are in nature’s hand. No hand took mine. I was a body of pain in an earth and sky of darkness. It will take death to make me forget.

She stood laughing in the water. Her laughter made my backbone ripple. It had neither shame nor shamelessness; she laughed alone, please with her victory over strange monstrous things.