“After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts like a Chinese nest of boxes oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front in our ancestors, back and back until...”

“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 ap...”

“We are *all* we are, and all in a sense we care to dream we are. And for that matter, anything outlandish, bizarre, is a godsend in this rather stodgy life. It is after all just what the old boy sa...”

“God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.”

“Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched ...”

“That's why I've just gone on collecting this particular kind of stuff what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it just...”

“Sibyl, what do you want?I want to live, the Sibyl said, and her voice rang rich and full. I want to keep on living forever and watching heroes and fools and knights go up and down, into the world a...”

“When God is driven to the periphery of the public square, the human spiritual capacity longs for exercise, and it often finds it in the suspension of disbelief and activity of the imagination that ...”

“When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you love it.”

“Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.”

“when you're a kid, they tell you that it's what's on the inside that counts. Looks don't matter . But that's not true. Guys like Phoebus in The Hunchback, or Dorian, or the old Kyle Kingsbury-- the...”

“Every concept of reality is all in our head, belief is what makes truth.”