“Mother, may I go and maffick,Tear around and hinder traffic?”

“A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.”

“It was the happiest Christmas Eve he had ever spent. To quote his own words, he had a rotten Christmas.”

“There was something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had survived in undiminished vigor where all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay.”

“Miles away, down through an opening in the hills, he could catch glimpses of a road where motor-cars sometimes passed, and yet here, so removed from the arteries of the latest civilization, was a bat-haunted old homestead, where something unmistakably like witchcraft seemed to hold a very practical sway.”

“And the vagueness of his alarm added to its terrors; when once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless.”

“The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.”