""Denyse had heard somewhere of a coffin being covered with a blanket of roses, and she wanted one as her own special offering. It was Caroline who persuaded her to hold herself down to a decent bunch of white flowers. Or really, persuaded isn't the word."

"And because she died during the war, when my father was abroad, the funeral had to be arranged by a family friend, and he just bought one grave. A good one, but single. She lies in the same desirable area as my father, but not near. As in life."

"Did you know, by the way, that somebody has to own a grave? Somebody, that is, other than the occupant. I own my father's grave. A strange thought."

"Dreams do not foretell the future. They reveal states of mind in which the future may be implicit."

"It is not a fact, except insofar as all coincidences are facts."

"Psychology plays a great part in my profession. I am rather a well-known criminal lawyer -- or have you checked that, too? I have to know something about the way people function. Without a pretty shrewd psychological sense I couldn't do what I do, which is to worm things out of people they don't want to tell. That's your job, too, isn't it." "No. My job is to listen to people say things they very badly want to tell but are afraid nobody else will understand. You use psychology as an offensive weapon in the interest of justice. I use it as a cure. So keen a lawyer as yourself will appreciate the difference."

"There used to be a widespread idea that women are very sensitive. My experience of them as clients, witnesses, and professional opponents had dispelled any illusions I might have had of that kind. Some women are sensitive, doubtless, but I have met with nothing to persuade me that they are, on the whole, more likely to be sensitive than men."

""Ha ha," laughed Dr Tschudi in a manner I came to be well acquainted with in Switzerland; it is the manner which acknowledges politely that a joke has been made, without in any way encouraging further jokiness."

"I was embarrassed to be such a fool in a situation that I had told myself and other people countless times I would never submit to -- talking to a psychiatrist, ostensibly seeking help, but without any confidence that he could give it. I have never believed these people can do anything for an intelligent man he can't do for himself. I have known many people who leaned on psychiatrists, and every one of them was a leaner by nature, who would have leaned on a priest if he had lived in an age of faith, or leaned on a teacup reader or an astrologer if he had not enough money to afford the higher hokum."

"When love strikes the successful middle-aged they bring a weight of personality and a resolution to it that makes the romances of the young seem timid and bungling. They are not troubled by doubt; they know what they want and they go after it."

"You must get to know your personal devil"

"This is the revenge of the unlived life, Ramsay. Suddenly it makes a fool of you."

"I know flattery when I hear it; but I do not often hear it."

"These petitioners had no conception of art; to them a picture was a symbol of something else, and very readily the symbol became the reality. They were untouched by modern education, but their government was striving with might and main to procure this inestimable benefit from them; anticlericalism and American bustle would soon free them from belief in miracles and holy likenesses. But where, I ask myself, will mercy and divine compassion come from then? Or are such things necessary to people who are well fed and know the wonders that lie concealed in an atom? I don't regret economic and educational advance; I just wonder how much we shall have to pay for it, and in what coin."

"Despite these afternoon misgivings and self-reproaches I clung to my notion, ill-defined though it was, that a serious study of any important body of human knowledge, or theory, or belief, if undertaken with a critical but not a cruel mind, would in the end yield some secret, some valuable permanent insight, into the nature of life and the true end of man."

"He let me know that he had been led into his marriage by love, and love alone; though he did not say so it was clear he owed Cupid a grudge."

"A fool-saint is somebody who seems to be full of holiness and loves everybody and does every good act he can, but because he's a fool it all comes to nothing- to worse than nothing, because it is virtue tainted with madness, and you can't tell where it'll end up."

"If you don't hurry up and let life know what you want, life will damned soon show you what you'll get."

"I promised that this would be a frank record, so far as I can write one, and God forbid that I should pretend that there is not a generous measure of spite in my nature."

"Then I was in love with herself after all, said Diana, making one of those feminine leaps in logic that leave men breathless."

"I knew she had eaten my father, and I was glad I did not have to fight any longer to keep her from eating me. Oh, these good, ignorant, confident women! How one grows to hate them!"

"I cannot remember a time when I did not take it as understood that everybody has at least two, if not twenty-two, sides to him."

"Not that any of the women spoke; they had done their speaking before church, and their husbands knew the price of peace."

"I think he expected me to agree enthusiastically, but I didn't. Nor did I contradict him; I have had too much experience of life to attempt to tell a really rich person anything."

""I am not convinced such a small library will know how to deal with it," said Jubilei. "Can you guarantee that it will be preserved, page by page, between sheets of acid-free paper?" I thought of Parlabane's squalid mess of typescript, and smiled a private smile."

"I was saying precisely that to my wife this morning at breakfast." "And what did she say?" "I think she said Yes dear, and went on making a list for her shopping. But that's beside the point…"

"That is what lends splendour to a university," said the Warden. "Not these dreadful interruptions of the natural order." "You lean always toward the light, Warden; perhaps both are necessary, for completeness."

"Like a real academic, she was wary of people outside the academic world — 'laymen' they called them — who seemed to know a lot. Knowledge was for professionals of knowledge."

"Important rule of professorcraft: never show resentment at a student insult — wait and get them later."

"They did not murmur the [ Canadian ] national prayer: "O God, grant me mediocrity and comfort; protect me from the radiance of Thy light.""

"A Philistine is someone who is content to live in a wholly unexplored world."

"It is a firm critical principle that nobody living is quite as good as somebody dead."

"Like a true university woman she set out on a criticism of the words which was rooted in what she had been taught; she had a critical system, unfailing in its power to reduce poetry to technicalities and to slide easily over its content. It was a system which, properly applied, could put Homer in his place and turn the Sonnets of Shakespeare into critic-fodder. Without intending to be so, it was a system which, once mastered, set the possessor free forever, should that be his wish, from anything a poet, however noble in spirit, might have felt and imparted to the world."

"There are no great performances without great audiences, and this is the barrier that film and television, by their utmost efforts, cannot cross, for there can be no interaction between what is done, and those to whom it is done. Great theatre, great music-drama, is created again and again on both sides of the footlights."

"Did you ever hear such enthusiasm? In Canada, I mean, the Home of Modified Rapture."

"What we call luck is the inner man externalized"

"A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life."

"She knew enough about the McRorys to hang them, she told herself, but she held her tongue. Judge not that ye be not judged. Of course, you can't be a Calvinist without judging, but as a Calvinist you know what God's ordinances are, so it isn't really judging. It's just knowing right from wrong."

"Whoever lives in the finest house in a small Canadian town dwells in a House of Atreus, about which a part of the community harbours the darkest mythical suspicions...In lesser houses there may be fighting, covert abortions, children "touched up" with a hot flat-iron to make them obedient, every imaginable aspect of parsimony, incest, and simple, persistent cruelty, but these are nothing to whatever seems amiss at the Big House."

"Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision."

"It was a man's mind, the size of a house."

"Catholicism has begotten much great art; Protestantism none at all – not a single painting. But Catholicism has fostered art in the very teeth of Christianity. The Kingdom of Christ, if it ever comes, will contain no art; Christ never showed the least concern with it. His church has inspired much but not because of anything the Master said. Who then was the inspirer? The much-maligned Devil, one supposes. It is he who understands and ministers to man's carnal and intellectual self, and art is carnal and intellectual."

"It was a philosophy deformed by that disease so fatal to philosophers – personal experience."

"The art of the quoter is to know when to stop."

"In the minds of politicians, perhaps more than anywhere, the notion of a million dollars has this accordion-like ability to expand or contract; if they are disposing of it, the million is a pleasing sum, reflecting warmly upon themselves; if somebody else wants it, it becomes a figure of inordinate size, not to be compassed by the rational mind."

"I was offered a lot of money for my story, "John Parlabane as I Knew Him", and the services of a ghost to write it up from my verbal confession. (It was assumed that, as a student, I would not be capable of coherent expression.)"

"The paradox of money is that when you have lots of it you can manage life quite cheaply. Nothing so economical as being rich."

"Poor woman, I suppose she led a dog's life, and it made her disagreeable, which she mistook for being strong."

"So what was I to do? To go backward was base: to go forward an adventure into splendour and terror. But it was forward I must go."

"No, it is in the story. I saw it in New York. The kings say, We bring you Gold, Frank Innocence, and Mirth." "Sancta simplicitas," said Darcourt. "If only there were more Mirth in the message He has left to us. We miss it sadly, in the world we have made."