Before this war is over,' [Walter] said - or something said through his lips - 'every man and woman and child in Canada will feel it - you, Mary, will feel it - feel it to your heart's core. You will weep tears of blood over it. The Piper has come - and he will pipe until every corner of the world has heard his awful and irresistible music. It will be years before the dance of death is over - years, Mary. And in those years millions of hearts will break.

Steal not this book for fear of shame For on it is the owners name And when you die the Lord will say Where is the book you stole away And when you say you do not know The Lord will say go down below.

Maples are such sociable trees ... They're always rustling and whispering to you.

It's all very well to read about sorrows and imagine yourself living through them heroically, but it's not so nice when you really come to have them, is it?

You have the itch for writing born in you. It's quite incurable. What are you going to do with it?

She looked like a head-on collision between a fashion plate and a nightmare.

It was rapture enough just to sit there beside him in silence, alone in the summer night in the white splendor of moonshine, with the wind blowing down on them out of the pine woods.