"Thank God I'm alive In the light of the Sun! It's a quarter to five; Thank God I'm alive! Now the hum of the hive Of the world has begun, Thank God I'm alive In the light of the Sun!"

"Here's the lily, here the rose Her full chalice shall disclose; Here's narcissus wet with dew, Windflower and the violet blue. Wear the garland I have made; Crowned with it, put pride away; For the wreath that blooms must fade; Thou thyself must fade some day, Rhodocleia."

"To be so closely caught up in the teeth of things that they kill you, no matter how infinitesimally kill you, is, truly, to be a poet: and to be a poet in fact it is additionally necessary that you should possess the tongues and instruments with which to record this series of infinitesimal deaths."

"Whoever one is, and wherever one is, one is always in the wrong if one is rude."

"A good play is a play which, when acted upon the boards, makes an audience interested and pleased. A play that fails in this is a bad play."

"[T]here is a vast difference between games and play. Play is played for fun, but games are deadly serious, and you do not play them to enjoy yourself."

"If you would know what the Lord God thinks of money, you have only to look at those to whom He gives it."

"I wish I was dead, And lay deep in the grave. I've a pain in my head, I wish I was dead. In a coffin of lead— With the Wise and the Brave— I wish I was dead, And lay deep in the grave."

"Her former trials had been sharp agony and strong excitement. Her present had neither the one nor the other; yet it was fraught with as heavy suffering, as any that had gone before it; even though she knew not, guessed not, _all_ that depended upon her conversion. It would have been comparatively easy to have endured, for her faith's sake, harshness and contempt; in such a case, self-respect rises to sustain us, and we value our own tenets the more, from their startling contrast with those which could command the cruelty we endure; but Father Denis used harshness neither of manner nor of words."

"Firmly impressed in his own mind, that it was utterly vain for a soul to hope for salvation unless it believed in Jesus, the Virgin, the saints and holy martyrs; he brought heart and soul to his task; and the more he saw of Marie, the more painfully did he deplore her blind infatuation, and the more ardently desire, to save her from the eternal perdition which, as a Jewess, must await her."

"Every Hebrew should look upon his Faith as a temple extending over every land to prove the immutability of God and the unity of His purposes."

"God save King Robert! then, say I," vociferated Alan, eagerly grasping the knight's hand. "Sit, sit, Sir Knight; and for the love of heaven, speak more of this most wondrous tale. Erewhile, we hear of this goodly Earl of Carrick at Edward's court, doing him homage, serving him as his own English knight, and now in Scotland--aye, and Scotland's king. How may we reconcile these contradictions?"

"The Englishwoman Grace Aguilar was a similar pioneer: her work includes the poems "Song of the Spanish Jews, During Their 'Golden Age'" and "A Vision of Jerusalem, While Listening to a Beautiful Organ in One of the Gentile Shrines," as well as books such as The Spirit of Judaism, The Women of Israel, and, posthumously, Sabbath Thoughts and Sacred Communings."

"In Mozart and Salieri we see the contrast between the genius which does what it must and the talent which does what it can."

"Lord Saint-Edith said he couldn't understand people thinking Bacon had written Shakespeare's plays. If they said Shakespeare had written the works of Bacon as a pastime he could understand it."

"Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened."

"He had at last discovered that love had no pith in it, and that the projection of one own's feelings upon the images of a beloved was in the long run, an act of self-mutilation."

"The art of prose governed by syncopated thinking; for thoughts curdle in the heart if not expressed. An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left."

"The Copts — the only branch of the Christian Church which was thoroughly integrated into the Orient! But then your good Bishop of Salisbury openly said he considered these oriental Christians as worse than infidels, and your Crusaders massacred them joyfully."

"Subconsciously he knew too, that the oriental woman is not a sensualist in the European sense; there is nothing mawkish in her constitution. Her true obsessions are power, politics and possessions - however much she might deny it. The sex ticks on in the mind, but its motions are warmed by the kinetic brutalities of money. (X)"

"In French the truth of passion stood up coldly and cruelly to the scrutiny of human experience. In his own curious phrase he [Pursewarden] had always qualified it as 'an unsniggerable language'. (VIII)"

"Music was invented to confirm human loneliness."

"Then he saw that she was blind, her face slightly upcast to her companion's in the manner of those whose expressions never fully attain their target — the eyes of another. (II)"

"here was Kenilworth now heading the new department concerned with Personnel [-] one of those blank administrative constructs which offered no openings into the world of policy. A dead end. [-] he would soon develop the negative powers of obstruction which always derive from a sense of failure. (IV)"

"Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other."

"A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants."

"No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat."

"A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying."

"Lovers can find nothing to say to each other that has not been said and unsaid a thousand times over. Kisses were invented to translate such nothings into wounds (I)"

"Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold – the meaning of the pattern. For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential—the imagination."

"There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature."

"Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie."

"the confluent smallpox – invented perhaps as the cruellest remedy for human vanity (II)"

"His profession [ diplomacy ] — offered him something like a long Jesuitical training in self-deception which enabled him to present an ever more highly polished surface to the world without deepening his human experience [-] for he lived surrounded by his ambitious and sycophantic fellows who taught him only how to excel in forms of address, and the elaborate kindnesses which, in pleasing, pave the way to advancement. (II)"

"That house with its remoteness and the islands going down like soft gongs all the time into the amazing blue, and I shall never,never ever forget a youth spent there, discovered by accident. It was pure gold. But then of course … youth does mean happiness, it does mean love, and that's something you can't get over."

"I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know."

"It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness."

"Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked."

"Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land."

"Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will—whatever we may think."

"His [a terrorist's] primary objective is not battle. It is to bring down upon the community in general a reprisal for his wrongs, in the hope that the fury and resentment roused by punishment meted out to the innocent will gradually swell the ranks of those from whom he will draw further recruits."

"It's unthinkable not to love — you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin."

"Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist."

"The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time … love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know."

"The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes… I have escaped to this island with a few books and the child — Melissa’s child. I do not know why I use the word ‘escape’. The villagers say jokingly that only a sick man would choose such a remote place to rebuild. Well, then, I have come here to heal myself, if you like to put it that way…."

"I think often, and never without a certain fear of Nessim's love for Justine. [-] It coloured his unhappiness with a kind of ecstasy [-] Yet one touch of humour would have saved him from such dreadful comprehensive suffering."

"I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together:the city which used us as its flora-precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria!"

"I remember Nessim once saying [-] that Alexandria was the great winepress of love; those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets — I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex."

"What is said of Charlotte may, with almost equal truth, be said of Emily and Anne; though they differed greatly in many points of character and disposition, they were each and all on common ground if a principle had to be maintained or a sham to be detected. They were all jealous of anything hollow or unreal. All were resolutely single-minded, eminently courageous, eminently simple in their habits, and eminently tender-hearted."

"If Anne Brontë had lived ten years longer she would have taken a place beside Jane Austen, perhaps even a higher place."