“...in the old days, silvery bells would often sound just as some Englishman or Englishwoman of particular virtue or beauty was about to be stolen away by fairies to live in strange, ghostly lands for ever.”

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

“It's no wonder we don't defend the land where we live. We don't live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances.”

“The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale.”

“In what resides the most characteristic Virtue of humanity?In good works? Possibly. In the creation of beautiful objects? Perhaps. But some would look in a different direction, and find it in detachment. To all such David Hume must be a great saint in the calendar; for no mortal being was ever more completely divested of the trammels of the personal and the particular, none ever practiced with more consummated success the divine art of impartiality”

“Tis strange - but true; for truth is always strange;Stranger than fiction; if it could be told,How much would novels gain by the exchange!How differently the world would men behold!How oft would vice and virtue places change!The new world would be nothing to the old,If some Columbus of the moral seasWould show mankind their souls' antipodes.”