“Even such is Time *Even such is Time, that takes in trustOur youth, our joys, our all we have,And pays us but with earth and dust;Who in the dark and silent grave,When we have wandered all our ways,Shuts up the story of our days:But from this earth, this grave, this dust,My God shall raise me up, I trust. Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618)*These lines are said to have been composed by Sir Walter Raleigh on the night before his execution.”

“Our taste must always be, more or less, the victim of our limitations, but we should beware of glorying in it, and, above all, we should beware of mistaking the aversions of timidity and sensibility for critical judgments.”

“What is our life? A play of passion.Our mirth the music of division.Our mother's wombs the tyring houses be,Where we are drest for this short Comedy.Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is,That sits and marks still who doth act amiss,Our graves that hide us from the searching sun,Are like drawn curtains when the play is done.Thus march we playing to our latest rest,Only we die in earnest, that's no jest.”

“When the grand twelve million jury of our sins and sinful fury, 'Gainst our souls black verdicts give, Christ pleads his death, and then we live. Be thou my speaker, taintless pleader, unblotted lawyer, true proceeder.”

“All we are, all we can be, are the stories we tell," he says, and he is talking as if he is talking only to me. "Long after we are gone, our words will be all that is left, and who is to say what really happened or even what reality is? Our stories, our fiction, our words will be as close to truth as can be. And no one can take that away from you.”

“The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.”

“There is more sense in your language, Bucklaw," replied the Master, "than might have been expected from your conduct - it is too true, our vices steal upon us in forms outwardly fair as those of the demons whom the superstitious represent as intriguing with the human race, and are not discovered in their native hideousness until we have clasped them in our arms.”