“Be of good comfort, Mr. Ridley, and play the man: We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust never shall be put out.”

“They crashed the front door and grabbed at a woman, though she was not running, she was not trying to escape. She was only standing, weaving from side to side, her eyes fixed upon a nothingness in the wall as if they had struck her a terrible blow upon the head. Her tongue was moving in her mouth, and her eyes seemed to be trying to remember something, and then they remembered and her tongue moved again: "Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”

“The world of shadows and superstition that was Victorian England, so well depicted in this 1871 tale, was unique. While the foundations of so much of our present knowledge of subjects like medicine, public health, electricity, chemistry and agriculture, were being, if not laid, at least mapped out, people could still believe in the existence of devils and demons. And why not? A good ghost story is pure entertainment. It was not until well into the twentieth century that ghost stories began to have a deeper significance and to become allegorical; in fact, to lose their charm. No mental effort is required to read 'The Weird Woman', no seeking for hidden meanings; there are no complexities of plot, no allegory on the state of the world. And so it should be. At what other point in literary history could a man, standing over the body of his fiancee, say such a line as this: 'Speak, hound! Or, by heaven, this night shall witness two murders instead of one!'Those were the days.(introduction to "The Weird Woman")”

“(S)ome people you will always have about you whom you can trust, and no man these days can boast of more than that. Remember them; forget the others.”

“Imagine the first discovery that one of these epidemics was man-made—the panic, the violence that would ensue. That’s where the end would come. A typhoon kills a few hundred people, does a few billion in damage, and what do we do?” Erskine interlocked his fingers. “We come together. We put the pieces back. But a terrorist’s bomb.” He frowned. “A terrorist’s bomb does the same damage, and it throws the world into turmoil.”He spread his hands apart like an explosion going off.“When there’s only God to blame, we forgive him. When it’s our fellow man, we must destroy him.”

“Timothy's eyes followed the straight back, the high shoulders, and the crisp white hair out of the door and out of his life -- a man, so he was to write years later, the like of whom he was never to met again, "because he was the only man I ever knew who could use words like honour, duty, and responsibility without making me feel like throwing up."”

“You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.”