For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short; for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.

God, children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!

What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?

Madness to us means reversion; to such people as Una and Lena it meant progression. Now their uncle had entered into a land beyond them, the land of fancy. For fifty years he had been as they were, silent, hard-working, unimaginative. Then all of a sudden, like a scholar passing his degree, he had gone up into another form.

Life, the permission to know death.

Youth is cause, effect is age; so with the thickening of the neck we get data.

The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.