“All the world's a stage, but it's also a canvas and a blank sheet of paper.”

“...All endeavours which are directed to a purely worldly end...contain within themselves the germs of their own corruption.”

“Jenny, all my life I have wanted to do miracles. I have wanted to be holy. I suppose it was ambition or pride or some other unworthy thing. It was not enough for me to conquer the world--I wanted to conquer heaven too.”

“But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned... There was a time when Free Love versus Catholic Morality was a question of as much importance to our hot bodies as if a pistol had been clapped to our heads.Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls, what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves.”

“Lancelot tried to have a Word. His Word was valuable to him not only because he was good, but also because he was bad. It is the bad people who need to have principles to restrain them.”

“My boy, you shall be everything in the world, animal, vegetable, mineral, protista, or virus, for all I care-before I have done with you-but you will have to trust my superior backsight. The time is not yet ripe for you to be a hawk... so you may as well sit down for the moment and learn to be a human being.”

“It was at the outskirts of the world that the Old Things accumulated, like driftwood round the edges of the sea. ("The Troll")”