“Haply for I am black,And have not those soft parts of conversationThat chamberers have; or for I am declinedInto the vale of years—yet that’s not much— She’s gone. I am abused, and my reliefMust be to loathe her. O curse of marriage,That we can call these delicate creatures oursAnd not their appetites! I had rather be a toadAnd live upon the vapor of a dungeonThan keep a corner in the thing I loveFor others’ uses. Yet ’tis the plague of great ones;Prerogatived are they less than the base.’Tis destiny unshunnable, like death.”

“I had rather be a toad, and live upon the vapor of a dungeon, than keep a corner in the thing I love for others uses.”

“I am not one of your repentant sinners, Kenneth. I have lived my life—God, what a life!—and as I have lived I shall die, unflinching and unchanged. Dare one to presume that a few hours spent in whining prayers shall atone for years of reckless dissoluteness? 'Tis a doctrine of cravens, who, having lacked in life the strength to live as conscience bade them, lack in death the courage to stand by that life's deeds. I am no such traitor to myself.”

“And what more am I? I look for aid to the imagination. [But how mistakenly!] I am not that assemblage of limbs we call the human body; I am not a subtle penetrating air distributed throughout all these members; I am not a wind, a fire, a vapor, a breath or anything at all that I can image. I am supposing all these things to be nothing. Yet I find, while so doing, that I am still assured that I am a something.”

“Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the finality of an axe, here I am exalted by having made use of it, by having spilled my guts in public. We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.”

“He leaned toward her father. “ ’Tis true, I am a murderer, a liar, and a thief. ’Tis equally true that I will use whatever monstrous talents I possess to keep your daughter at my side. You can take Avalene to a convent at the ends of the earth and I will find her and steal her away again. I will lie to God, himself, to free her. I will protect her with my life, and I will murder anyone who threatens her.”