“In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.”

“There is something very morbid about modern sympathy with pain.”

“People used to romanticize the natural world, before the Rising. These days, we mostly just run away from it.”

“Nothing seems worthwhile. My very thoughts are old. I've thought them all before. What is the use of living after all, Anne?”

“Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with 'modern' as it had not been before and is not now [1977].”

“As the Roman Empire came to its close, all the old gods of the pagan world were seen as demons by the Christians who rose. It was useless to tell them as the centuries passed that their Christ was but another God of the Wood, dying and rising, as Dionysus or Osiris had done before him, and that the Virgin Mary was in fact the Good Mother again enshrined. Theirs was a new age of belief and conviction, and in it we became devils, detached from what they believed, as old knowledge was forgotten or misunderstood.”