“As he walked, the sad faded leaves were driven pitilessly around him by the wind, and under the mingling influences of autumn and evening, a craving for the quietude of the grave … overtook him with unwanted intensity.”

“The widower reviewed his past in a sunless light which was intensified by the greyness of the November twilight, whilst the bells subtly impregnated the surrounding atmosphere with the melody of sounds that faded like the ashes of dead years.”

“Can there be anything more sad than a girl dying on the day of her first communion, in her new dress. A little bride of death...”

“Bruges was his dead wife. And his dead wife was Bruges. The two were united in a like destiny. It was Bruges-la-Morte, the dead town entombed in its stone quais, with the arteries of its canals cold once the great pulse of the sea had ceased beating in them.”

“...without knowing why, he yielded to the temptation of those lips and flung onto them, eating them, partaking of their sacrament... Eucharist of love with a red host!”

“The beauty of sorrow is superior to the beauty of life.”

“Dissonance is as fatal in ailments of the mind as it is in those of the body.”