Their quarrel was no more surprising than are most quarrels — inevitable at the time, incredible afterwards.

They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.

'A friend,' he repeated, sentimental suddenly. 'Someone to last your whole life and you his. I suppose such a thing can't really happen outside sleep.'

The Germans are called brutal, the Spanish cruel, the Americans superficial, and so on; but we are perfide Albion, the island of hypocrites, the people who have built up an Empire with a Bible in one hand, a pistol in the other, and financial concessions in both pockets. Is the charge true? I think it is.

...though nothing is damaged, everything is changed.

But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.