“It's hard to part the curtains when the dark holds such familiarity.”

“Every book should begin with attractive endpapers. Preferably in a dark colour: dark red or dark blue, depending on the binding. When you open the book it's like going to the theatre. First you see the curtain. Then it's pulled aside and the show begins.”

“What he wanted was colours which would appear stronger and clearer in artificial light. He did not particularly care if they looked crude or insipid in daylight, for he lived most of his life at night, holding that night afforded greater intimacy and isolation and that the mind was truly roused and stimulated only by awareness of the dark; moreover he derived a peculiar pleasure from being in a well-lighted room when all the surrounding houses were wrapped in sleep and darkness, a sort of enjoyment in which vanity may have played some small part, a very special feeling of satisfaction familiar to those who sometimes work late at night and draw aside the curtains to find that all around them the world is dark, silent and dead.”

“(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.”

“Our job on earth, as I see it, is to hold on through the hard parts and try and be a good person.”

“Dusty, dark, cold, and hard, coal has no beauty of its own, but when it is consummated by fire it is beautiful and becomes what it was designed to be.”