A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.

How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.

Nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn.

There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is self-propagating.

I was in a maze. No matter which way I turned, it was the wrong way.