There was an omnipresent sense of crisis.

The right to take a chance, the right to suffer. The right to be unwise, the right to die. These aims are hateful to the government, which values ever frightened mouse and falling sparrow as equal to a tiger burning bright.

What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offence liking yourself's the beginning of all love.

There was an omnipresent sense of crisis.

Devils may be nothing but beings intent on their purpose, which now happens to collide with yours.

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.

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?