“The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.”

“As spread thighs are to the libertine...so was the letter V to young Stencil.”

“It was her work of art, her poem and her prayer, to repeat this story, low and precipitately, as if she were in the confessional. You felt that she came to it quite naturally, without transition, so completely did it posses her whenever they were alone.”

“A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.”

“Few poets better convey the uneasy transition from Victorianism to Modernism than Thomas Hardy. His novels, written between 1870 and 1895, made him not only the recorder of his distinctive region of 'Wessex', but the explorer of the transition of lives and minds from the age of traditional values and religious certainties to the age of godlessness and modern tragedy, a transition sometimes described as 'the clash of the modern'.”

“Beware: It is a quick transition from a nourishing sense of gratitude to a poisonous sense of entitlement.”