I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.

Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.

I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.

Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.

I will go down with my colours flying.

Tell me", he wanted to say, "everything in the whole world" - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry - but how to speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depth of the sea instead?

Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.