Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back -- to be sucked back -- into it?

The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.

I cannot understand how a man can appear in print claiming to disbelieve everything that he presupposes when he puts on the surplice. I feel it is a form of prostitution.

Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

To play well the scenes in which we are 'on' concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.

Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be vulgarity - like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.