The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.

Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.

I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.

Sometimes," I ventured, "it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her.