Consolation for those moments when you can't tell whether you're the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.

The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.

I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.

The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!

For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping.

We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie asleep.