“And the first rude sketch that the world has seenwas joy to his mighty heart,Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves, "It's pretty, but is it art?”

“Holden found one helpless little hand that closed feebly on his finger. And the clutch ran through his body till it settled about his heart. Till then his sole thought had been for Ameera. He began to realise that there was some one else in the world,...”

“Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.”

“I had never seen the jungle. They fed me behind bars from an iron pan till one night I felt that I was Bagheera - the Panther - and no man's plaything, and I broke the silly lock with one blow of my paw and came away; and because I had learned the ways of men, I became more terrible in the jungle than Shere Khan.”

“When Earth's last picture is painted And the tubes are twisted and dried When the oldest colors have faded And the youngest critic has died We shall rest, and faith, we shall need it Lie down for an aeon or two 'Till the Master of all good workmen Shall put us to work anew And those that were good shall be happy They'll sit in a golden chair They'll splash at a ten league canvas With brushes of comet's hair They'll find real saints to draw from Magdalene, Peter, and Paul They'll work for an age at a sitting And never be tired at all. And only the Master shall praise us. And only the Master shall blame. And no one will work for the money. No one will work for the fame. But each for the joy of the working, And each, in his separate star, Will draw the thing as he sees it. For the God of things as they are!”

“They believed us and perished for it. Our statecraft, our learningDelivered them bound to the Pit and alive to the burningWhither they mirthfully hastened as jostling for honour -Not since her birth has our Earth seen such worth loosed upon her.Nor was their agony brief, or once only imposed on them.The wounded, the war-spent, the sick received no exemption:Being cured they returned and endured and achieved our redemption,Hopeless themselves of relief, till Death, marvelling, closed on them.That flesh we had nursed from the first in all cleanness was givenTo corruption unveiled and assailed by the malice of Heaven -By the heart-shaking jests of Decay where it lolled on the wires -To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes - to be cindered by fires -To be senselessly tossed and retossed in stale mutilationFrom crater to crater. For this we shall take expiation. But who shall return us the children?”

“Of course the Man was wild too. He was dreadfully wild. He didn't even begin to be tame till he met the Woman, and she told him that she did not like living in his wild ways. She picked out a nice dry Cave, instead of a heap of wet leaves, to lie down in; and she strewed clean sand on the floor; and she lit a nice fire of wood at the back of the Cave; and she hung a dried wild-horse skin, tail down, across the opening of the Cave; and she said, 'Wipe your feet, dear, when you come in, and now we'll keep house.”