“If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake them before he is decrepit.”

“He has come to be the great man he thought he wanted to be. If this is true, then he is not a man. He is still a little boy and wants the moon.”

“A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity - or none at all - with which to analyse it and judge how to channel it.”

“Denys (Finch-Hatton) has been written about before and he will be written about again. If someone has not already said it, someone will say that he was a great man who never achieved greatness, and this will not only be trite, but wrong; he was a great man who never achieved arrogance.”

“Man has the lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end up destroying the earth.”

“Then he began to pity the great fish that he had hooked. He is wonderful and strange and who knows how old he is, he thought. Never have I had such a strong fish nor one who acted so strangely. Perhaps he is too wise to jump. He could ruin me by jumping or by a wild rush. But perhaps he has been hooked many times before and he knows that this is how he should make his fight. He cannot know it is only one man against him, nor that it is an old man. But what a great fish he is and what will he bring in the market if the flesh is good. He took the bait like a male and he pulls like a male and his fight has no panic in it. I wonder if he has plans or if he is just as desperate as I am?”