“I cannot tell if I was more tired or more grateful. Both at least, I was: tired as I never was before that night; and grateful to Gd as I trust I have been often, though never with more cause.”

“I swear to God I will never set eyes on him again. I bind my honour to you that I am done with him in this world. It is all at an end. And indeed he does not want my help; you do not know him as I do; he is safe, he is quite safe; mark my words, he will never more be heard of. ~Jekyll”

“I have been made to learn that the doom and burden of our life is bound forever on man’s shoulders; and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.”

“What am I to call it? Diffidence? The fear of ridicule? Inverted vanity? What matters names, if it has brought me to this? I could never bear to be bustling about nothing; I was ashamed of this toy kingdom from the first; I could not tolerate that people should fancy I believed in a thing so patently absurd! I would do nothing that cannot be done smiling. I have a sense of humour, forsooth! I must know better than my Maker. And it was the same thing in my marriage," he added more hoarsely. "I did not believe this girl could care for me; I must not intrude; I must preserve the foppery of my indifference. What an impotent picture!""Ay, we have the same blood," moralised Gotthold. "You are drawing, with fine strokes, the character of the born sceptic.""Sceptic?—coward!" cried Otto. "Coward is the word. A springless, putty-hearted, cowering coward!”

“A hanging in a good quarrel is an easy death they say, though I could never hear of any that came back to say so.”

“Some day...after I am dead, you may perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell you.”

“I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first.”