He built up a situation that was far enough from the truth. It never occurred to him that Helen was to blame. He forgot the intensity of their talk, the charm that had been lent him by sincerity, the magic of Oniton under darkness and of the whispering river. Helen loved the absolute. Leonard had been ruined absolutely, and had appeared to her as a man apart, isolated from the world. A real man, who cared for adventure and beauty, who desired to live decently and pay his way, who could have travelled more gloriously through life than the Juggernaut car that was crushing him.

Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.

Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?

You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but not everything.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say "yesterday I was happy, today I am not.