To remember love after long sleep; to turn again to poetry after a year in the market place, or to youth after resignation to drowsy and stiffening age; to remember what once you thought life could hold, after telling over with muddied and calculating fingers what it has offered; this is music, made after long silence. The soul flexes its wings, and, clumsy as any fledgling, tries the air again

I had always been content to know that there was more in the living world than we could hope to understand.

You never know how you'll turn out till you've been down to half a dollar and no prospects.

It seems to me you can be awfully happy in this life if you stand aside and watch and mind your own business, and let other people do as they like about damaging themselves and one another. You go on kidding yourself that you're impartial and tolerant and all that, then all of a sudden you realize you're dead, and you've never been alive at all.

It does not do to neglect the gods of a place, whoever they may be. In the end, they are all one.

I reached for sleep and drew it round me like a blanket muffling pain and thought together in the merciful dark

There are few men more superstitious than soldiers. They are, after all, the men who live closest to death.