Here then is the pattern in my carpet, the sense of the eternal mysteries, the eternal beauty hidden beneath the crust of common and commonplace things; hidden and yet burning and glowing continually if you care to look with purged eyes.

There are certain scenes, certain hills and valleys and groves of pines which demand that a story shall be written about them. I would refine; I would say that the emotions aroused by these external things reverberating in the heart are indeed the story; or all that signifies the story....We translate a hill into a tale, conceive lovers to explain a brook, turn the perfect into the imperfect.

And it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe, the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by the Gray's Inn Road will never find these secrets elsewhere.

It appears to me that it [sin] is simply an attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden manner. You can understand why it is so rare. There are few, indeed, who wish to penetrate into other spheres, higher or lower, in ways allowed or forbidden. Men, in the mass, are amply content with life as they find it. Therefore there are few saints, and sinners (in the proper sense) are fewer still.

Old stories often turn out to be true.

There are strange things lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the newspaper.

Now, everybody, I suppose, is aware that in recent years the silly business of divination by dreams has ceased to be a joke and has become a very serious science.