It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.

In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.

To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.

I cannot help feeling there is something essentially wrong about love. Friends may quarrel or drift apart, close relations too, but there is not this pang, this pathos, this fatality which clings to love. Friendship never has that doomed look. Why, what is the matter? I have not stopped loving you, but because I cannot go on kissing your dim dear face, we must part, we must part.

A thousand years ago five minutes were Equal to forty ounces of fine sand. Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and Infinite aftertime: above your head They close like giant wings, and you are dead.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.