“Albert J. Guerard has justlycalled the story "one of the great dark meditationsin literature, and one of the purest expressions of a melancholy temperament.”

“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”

“In literature one has the best company in the world at complete command; one also has the worst. One has a social conscience which dissuades one from harbouring unprofitable company in life, and I find that my two canons are a great aid and support for an analogous literary conscience which speaks up against consorting with unprofitable company in literature.”

“To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching; to Parnassus there is no primer and nothing that one can learn is ever worth learning.”

“The great impact of Hellenistic culture was, however, no in natural science, but in the more Plato-inspired imaginative literature. The modern novel has its origins in the ultra-heroic and fantastic literature of the Hellenistic world intellectually centered in Alexandria. The life of Alexander the Great was itself one of the prime genres of Hellenistic romanticized literature, and remained so into the sixteenth century.”

“There is great literature about imprisonment, . . . about the foot soldier, . . . about the sea -- but not one great work about flying.”