“Every day there comes a moment when a person lays his hands in his lap and all his busyness collapses like ashes. The work accomplished is, from the soul's point of view, entirely imaginary.”

“The wild women in his lap,' my father enthused, 'laying their breasts on his head.'There was a moment of stunned silence. Then my mother spoke slowly, with an edge to her voice. 'I think you mean "wild beasts laying their heads in his lap".''Do I?”

“A good novel is the biography of an imaginary person--and when the biography is completed, the person is no longer imaginary; he is as real as his creator”

“The soul is like an uninhabited worldthat comes to life only whenGod lays His headagainst us.”

“You'll never really understand a person, until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it”

“This is all a tale of an older world and a forgotten countryside. At this moment of time change has come; a screaming line of steel runs through the heather of no-man’s-land, and the holiday-maker claims the valleys for his own. But this busyness is but of yesterday, and not ten years ago the fields lay quiet to the gaze of placid beasts and the wandering stars. This story I have culled from the grave of an old fashion, and set down for the love of a great soul and the poetry of life.”