I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

I prefer men to cauliflowers

To enjoy freedom ... we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose.

Of the rest some we know to be dead though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six.

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.