“There's a queer streak in human natures. Men come back to places for secret reasons, for feelings they cannot resist.'More than men come back,” I said.”

“All of those things - rock and men and river - resisted change, resisted the coming as they did the going. Hood warmed and rose slowly, breaking open the plain, and cooled slowly over the plain it buried. The nature of things is resistance to change, while the nature of process is resistance to stasis, yet things and process are one, and the line from inorganic to organic and back is uninterrupted and unbroken.”

“When the Holy Spirit does his work of regeneration in the hearts of men he does not come on them with great powerful feelings and emotions which cannot be resisted. He does not possess men as evil spirits take possession of their victims.”

“It was the reason he had survived. It was the ordinary way of saying she would refuse all other men. Only you. Come back.”

“Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to the west slaying their fellows.”

“All monsters are queers. Who is able to bring the dead back to life? God and the Devil. The Devil makes dead men into monsters: immortal, immoral—and queer.”