And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!

Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.

Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.

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.

Nothing is stronger than the position of the dead among the living.

Conversation, fastidious goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will.

I feel all shadows of the universe multiplied deep inside my skin.