Yet for all the childish innocence of its bizarre glamor, Venice developed an atmosphere, or became the outpost of a sinister deep-rooted power.... It is a place of dreams, not only the tinseled ones.

Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards.

Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy , looking for the philosopher's stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find.

Things are different from what I thought. They're much worse.

Of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself.

What was life worth, anyway, if you had to sit around remembering not to mention this, that, and the other thing because someone else might be upset?

Then time seemed to stop, or rather to lose its directional urgency of movement; it became a place in the open where one stood rather than a low, narrow corridor down which one was hurried.