I care not if I live but a day and a night, so long as my deeds live after me.

Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice. He thought that in her eyes he would ascent to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul's incurable lonliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own.

This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.

People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep.

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

Let my country die for me.

Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to make it fall.