“She is not fair to outward viewAs many maidens be;Her loveliness I never knewUntil she smiled on me.Oh! then I saw her eye was bright,A well of love, a spring of light.”

“Is love a fancy, or a feeling? No.It is immortal as immaculate Truth,'Tis not a blossom shed as soon as youth,Drops from the stem of life--for it will grow,In barren regions, where no waters flow,Nor rays of promise cheats the pensive gloom.A darkling fire, faint hovering o'er a tomb,That but itself and darkness nought doth show,It is my love's being yet it cannot die,Nor will it change, though all be changed beside;Though fairest beauty be no longer fair,Though vows be false, and faith itself deny,Though sharp enjoyment be a suicide,And hope a spectre in a ruin bare.”

“They passed the hall, that echoes still,Pass as lightly as you will.The brands were flat, the brands were dying,Amid their own white ashes lying;But when the lady passed, there cameA tongue of light, a fit of flame;And Christabel saw the lady's eye,And nothing else saw she thereby,”

“To my mind's eye, my buried memories of Brandham Hall are like effects of chiaroscuro, patches of light and dark: it is only with effort that I see them in terms of colour. There are things I know, though I don't know how I know them, and things that I remember. Certain things are established in my mind as facts, but no picture attaches to them; on the other hand there are pictures unverified by any fact which recur obsessively, like the landscape of a dream.”

“And in Life's noisiest hour,There whispers still the ceaseless Love of Thee,The heart's Self-solace and soliloquy.You mould my Hopes, you fashion me within ;And to the leading Love-throb in the HeartThro' all my Being, thro' my pulse's beat ;You lie in all my many Thoughts, like Light,Like the fair light of Dawn, or summer EveOn rippling Stream, or cloud-reflecting Lake.And looking to the Heaven, that bends above you,How oft! I bless the Lot that made me love you.”

“Lizzie and I arrived in the polluted heat of a London summer. We stood frozen at street corners as a blur of pedestrians burst out of the subways and spilled like ants down the pavements. The crowed bars, the expensive shops, the fashionable clothes - to me it all seemed a population rushing about to no avail...I stared at a huge poster of a woman in her underwear staring down at her own breasts. HELLO BOYS, she said. At the movies we witnessed sickening violence, except that this time we held tubs of popcorn between our legs and the gunfire and screams were broadcast in digital Dolby. We had escaped a skull on a battlefield, only to arrive in London, where office workers led lines of such tedium and plenty that they had to entertain themselves with all the f****** and killing on the big screen. So here then was the prosperous, democratic and civilized Western world. A place of washing machines, reality TV, Armani, frequent-flier miles, mortgages. And this is what the Africans are supposed to hope for, if they're lucky.”

“No, I thought, growing more rebellious, life has its own laws and it is for me to defend myself against whatever comes along, without going snivelling to God about sin, my own or other people's. How would it profit a man if he got into a tight place, to call he people who put him there miserable sinners? Or himself a miserable sinner? I disliked the levelling aspect of this sinnerdom, it was like a cricket match played in a drizzle, where everybody had an excuse - and what a dull excuse! - for playing badly. Life was meant to test a man, bring out his courage, initiative, resource; and I longed, I thought, to be tested: I didn't want to fall on my knees and call myself a miserable sinner. But the idea of goodness did attract me, for I did not regard it as the opposite of sin. I saw it as something bright and positive and sustaining, like the sunshine, something to be adored, but from afar.”