The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveler, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.

A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.

I do think all good and evil comes from words. I have to tune myself into a good temper with something musical, and I run to a book as a child to its mother.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.

Her life-that was the only chance she had-the short season between two silences.

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.