I didn't want to die - not before I'd finished reading The Return of the Native anyhow.

But I've grown thoughtful now. And you have lost Your early-morning freshness of surprise At being so utterly mine: you've learned to fear The gloomy, stricken places in my soul, And the occasional ghosts that haunt my gaze.

I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers.

And the wind upon its way whispered the boughs of May, And touched the nodding peony flowers to bid them waken.

For it is humanly certain that most of us remember very little of what we have read. To open almost any book a second time is to be reminded that we had forgotten well-nigh everything that the writer told us. Parting from the narrator and his narrative, we retain only a fading impression; and he, as it were, takes the book away from us and tucks it under his arm.

The dead...are more real than the living because they are complete.

Man, it seemed, had been created to jab the life out of Germans.