“It is finished. Old Mitsima's words repeated themselves in his mind. Finished, finished....In silence and from a long way off, but violently. desperately, hopelessly, he had loved Kiakimé. And now it was finished. He was sixteen.”

“...‘Beetles, black beetles’ – his father had a really passionate feeling about the clergy. Mumbo-jumbery was another of his favourite words. An atheist and an anti-clerical of the strict old school he was.”

“Dinted dimpled wimpled--his mind wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words.”

“He was digging in his garden--digging, too, in his own mind, laboriously turning up the substance of his thought. Death--and he drove in his spade once, and again, and yet again. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools they way to dusty death. A convincing thunder rumbled through the words. He lifted another spadeful of earth. Why had Linda died? Why had she been allowed to become gradually less than human and at last... He shuddered. A good kissing carrion. He planted his foot on his spade and stamped it fiercely into the tough ground. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kills us for their sport. Thunder again; words that proclaimed themselves true--truer somehow than truth itself. And yet that same Gloucester had called them ever-gentle gods. Besides, thy best of rest is sleep, and that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st thy death which is no more. No more than sleep. Sleep. Perchance to dream. His spade struck against a stone; he stooped to pick it up. For in that sleep of death, what dreams...?”

“Wild inside; raging,writhing—yes, "writhing" was the word, writhing with desire. Butoutwardly he was hopelessly tame; outwardly—baa, baa, baa.”

“During his long career as an agitator, Hitler had studied the effects of herd-poison and had learned how to exploit them for his own purposes. He had discovered that the orator can appeal to those "hidden forces" which motivate men's actions, much more effec­tively than can the writer. Reading is a private, not a collective activity. The writer speaks only to indi­viduals, sitting by themselves in a state of normal sobriety. The orator speaks to masses of individuals, already well primed with herd-poison. They are at his mercy and, if he knows his business, he can do what he likes with them. ”

“The physician had asked the patient to read aloud a paragraph from the statutes of Trinity College, Dublin. ‘It shall be in the power of the College to examine or not examine every Licentiate, previous to his admission to a fellowship, as they shall think fit.’ What the patient actually read was: ‘An the bee-what in the tee-mother of the trothodoodoo, to majoram or that emidrate, eni eni krastei, mestreit to ketra totombreidei, to ra from treido a that kekritest.’ Marvellous! Philip said to himself as he copied down the last word. What style! What majestic beauty! The richness and sonority of the opening phrase! ‘An the bee-what in the tee-mother of the trothodoodoo.’ He repeated it to himself. ‘I shall print it on the title page of my next novel,’ he wrote in his notebook.”