“He read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain.”

“Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.”

“It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.”

“As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had fail...”

“It was very sad under the trees. Although spring was well advanced, in the deep shade there was nothing but death-rotten leaves, gray and white fungi, and over everything a funeral hush.”

“...let us consider the holes in our own bodies and into what these congenital wounds open. Under the skin of man is a wondrous jungle where veins like lush tropical growths hang along over-ripe org...”

“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

“This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.”