Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.

... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.

The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that's the secret that most of your friends have lost.

“Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears,” he said. “Well, she opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say that she blinds people. What she does is just the contrary — she fastens their eyelids open, so that they're never again in the blessed darkness.”

There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.