“What I Suddenly UnderstandMy job is to make people uncomfortable. + I will do it all my life. ---> My mother, Sasha Blake, is my first victim.”

“Then Blake pulled another paper from the envelope: a reservation at a bed and breakfast in Rhinebeck. Blake nuzzled Livia’s neck. “Now this I know what to do with. You’ve been my bride. I promise to spend all night making you my wife.”

“I don't do my job to catch the bad guys. Why would I want to do that? No, I do my job to make order out of chaos.”

“This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed.”

“I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?”

“Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me “weak” or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life…If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book [The Works of William Blake, with Edwin Ellis, 1893], nor would The Countess Kathleen [stage play, 1892] have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”