No one will be much or little except in someone else's mind, so be careful of the minds you get into.

Too great a sense of identity makes a man feel he can do no wrong. And too little does the same.

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.

Destiny and history are untidy.

I've seen death and I didn't like it.

When autumn shadows throw their patterns across the land, they are not the images of fragile, dying leaves, not the bared arms of lofty elms, not shadows of a fading summer; but swinging shapes as of books upon a strap, of round and square boxes held under an arm, of hurrying little people heading towards the nearest school.