“I believe . . . that the petal of a flower or a tiny worm on the path says far more, contains far more than all the books in the library. One cannot say very much with mere letters and words. Sometimes I'll be writing a Greek letter, a theta or an omega, and tilt my pen just the slightest bit; suddenly the letter has a tail and becomes a fish; in a second it evokes all the streams and rivers of the world, all that is cool and humid, Homer's sea and the waters on which Saint Peter wandered; or becomes a bird, flaps its tail, shakes out its feathers, puffs itself up, laughs, flies away. You probably don't appreciate letters like that, very much, do you, Narcissus? But I say: with them God wrote the world.”

“The O was not a number – a zero. It was a letter – the first letter of the word One. But it was far more than that. It was a symbol in itself – the symbol of unity. The perfect circle. Of the complete unit. The never ending. The One.And the snake? The snake was not a perfect circle. It could never be unified – not even if it began to eat its own tail. The symbol of one who depends only upon itself for nourishment.”

“Every body at all addicted to letter writing, without having much to say, which will include a large proportion of the female world at least…”

“Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.”

“But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.”

“You have qualities that are just as important, far more so, in fact. It's perhaps cheeky of me to say so, I don't know you very well. I'm a bachelor, I don't know very much about women, I lead a quiet sort of life down here at Manderley, as you know, but I should say that kindliness, and sincerity, and if I may say so—modesty—are worth far more to a man, to a husband, than all the wit and beauty in the world.”