Without imagination of the one kind or of the other, mortal existence is indeed a dreary and prosaic business... Illumined by the imagination, our life, whatever its defeats - is a never-ending unforeseen strangeness and adventure and mystery.

Oh, pity the poor glutton Whose troubles all begin In struggling on and on to turn What's out into what's in.

Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word," he said. Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone, And how the silence surged softly backward, When the plunging hoofs were gone.

He got out of bed and peeped through the blinds. To the east and opposite to him gardens and an apple-orchard lay, and there in strange liquid tranquility hung the morning star, and rose, rilling into the dusk of night the first grey of dawn. The street beneath its autumn leaves was vacant, charmed, deserted.

Now that cleverness was the fashion most people were clever - even perfect fools; and cleverness after all was often only a bore: all head and no body

It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.

God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.