In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question.

It was not certain what significance the ceremony held... but the formality was no less sacred for it being unintelligible

Noon, ripe as thunder and silent as thought, had fled unfingered.

Each day I live in a glass room unless I break it with the thrusting of my senses and pass through the splintered walls to the great landscape.

And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?

There are times when the air that floats between mortals becomes, in its stillness and silence, as cruel as the edge of a scythe.

When he at least reached the door the handle had cease to vibrate. Lowering himself suddenly to his knees he placed his head and the vagaries of his left eye (which was for ever trying to dash up and down the vertical surface of the door), he was able by dint of concentration to observe, within three inches of his keyholed eye, an eye which was not his, being not only of a different colour to his own iron marble, but being, which is more convincing, on the other side of the door.