“But I have gone back to work; I try to intoxicate myself with ink, the way others intoxicate themselves with brandy, so as to forget the public disasters and my private sorrows.”

“Intoxicating joy it is for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting, the world once seemed to me.”

“Alannah took a step back. “Brennus, are you intoxicated?”“I am King Brennus. I do not become intoxicated. I am intoxicating.”Alannah let out another giggle. “This is not like you. How much have you had?”Brennus leaned his shoulder against the wall. “Two, maybe three.”“Glasses?”“Bottles.”

“I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkeness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility.”

“I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.”

“The scent of wine risingfrom my grave will be so strongthat it will intoxicate passers-by.There will be such an atmosphere of serenitythat couples in love will find it impossibleto tear themselves away.”