Manalive quotes

A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable happiness, and tore eastward across England, trailing with it the frosty scent of forests and the cold intoxication of the sea.

In a million holes and corners it refreshed a man like a flagon, and astonished him like a blow.

when this invisible energy caught and swung and clashed them round his head like a wreath or salutation of seraphic wings.

There was in it something more inspired and authoritative even than the old wind of the proverb; for this was the good wind that blows nobody harm.

The flying blast struck London just where it scales the northern heights, terrace above terrace, as precipitous as Edinburgh.

… inmost chambers of intricate and embowered houses it woke like a domestic explosion, littering the floor with some professor’s papers till they seemed as precious as fugitive, or blowing out the candle by which a boy read Treasure Island and wrapping him in roaring dark.

But everywhere it bore drama into undramatic lives, and carried the trump of crisis across the world.

Many a harassed mother in a mean backyard had looked at five dwarfish shirts on the clothesline as at some small, sick tragedy; it was as if she had hanged her five children.

The ship, however, was not wholly deserted.

The proprietor of the boardinghouse, a Mrs. Duke, was one of those helpless persons against whom fate wars in vain; she smiled vaguely both before and after all her calamities; she was too soft to be hurt.

But by the aid (or rather under the orders) of a strenuous niece she always kept the remains of a clientele, mostly of young but listless folks.

Nor is such a poetic fancy inappropriate, for there was something oddly romantic about this inrush of air and light after a long, leaden and unlifting day. Grass and garden trees seemed glittering with something at once good and unnatural, like a fire from fairyland.

It seemed like a strange sunrise at the wrong end of the day.

The girl in white dived in quickly enough, for she wore a white hat of the proportions of a parachute, which might have wafted her away into the coloured clouds of evening.

The burst of light released and the burst of air blowing seemed to come almost simultaneously; and the wind especially caught everything in a throttling violence. The bright short grass lay all one way like brushed hair.

Every shrub in the garden tugged at its roots like a dog at the collar, and strained every leaping leaf after the hunting and exterminating element.

Now and again a twig would snap and fly like a bolt from an arbalist. The three men stood stiffly and aslant against the wind, as if leaning against a wall. The two ladies disappeared into the house;

She was light; but there was nothing leaping about her lightness. She spurned the ground, and she meant to spurn it.

People talk of the pathos and failure of plain women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.

“It’s enough to blow your head off,” said the young woman in white, going to the looking-glass.

Tall, slim, aquiline, and dark, she seemed made for such swiftness. In body she was of the breed of those birds and beasts that are at once long and alert, like greyhounds or herons or even like an innocent snake.

The whole house revolved on her as on a rod of steel.

It would be wrong to say that she commanded; for her own efficiency was so impatient that she obeyed herself before anyone else obeyed her.

His treatise on “The Probable Existence of Pain in the Lowest Organisms” had been universally hailed by the scientific world as at once solid and daring.

In short, he undoubtedly had brains; and perhaps it was not his fault if they were the kind of brains that most men desire to analyze with a poker.

The young man who put his hat off and on was a scientific amateur in a small way, and worshipped the great Warner with a solemn freshness. It was, in fact, at his invitation that the distinguished doctor was present;

He was one of those obvious unnoticeable people: everyone knew that he was Arthur Inglewood, unmarried, moral, decidedly intelligent, living on a little money of his own, and hiding himself in the two hobbies of photography and cycling.

Everybody knew him and forgot him; even as he stood there in the glare of golden sunset there was something about him indistinct, like one of his own red-brown amateur photographs.

The third man had no hat; he was lean, in light, vaguely sporting clothes, and the large pipe in his mouth made him look all the leaner.

The colossal clearance which the wind had made of that cloudy sky grew clearer and clearer; chamber within chamber seemed to open in heaven.

One felt one might at last find something lighter than light.

In the fullness of this silent effulgence all things collected their colours again: the gray trunks turned silver, and the drab gravel gold. One bird fluttered like a loosened leaf from one tree to another, and his brown feathers were brushed with fire.

“And people in their senses?” asked Warner, smiling.

“Oh, they ought to be kicked,” said Michael with sudden heartiness.

“The message is clearly insane,” continued the impenetrable Warner. “The best test is a reference to the undeveloped normal type. Even a baby does not expect to find a man with three legs.”

The shiny black cylinder of Dr. Warner’s official hat sailed off his head in the long, smooth parabola of an airship, and in almost cresting a garden tree was caught in the topmost branches. Another hat was gone.

Those in that garden felt themselves caught in an unaccustomed eddy of things happening; no one seemed to know what would blow away next.

Before they could speculate, the cheering and hallooing hat-hunter was already halfway up the tree, swinging himself from fork to fork with his strong, bent, grasshopper legs, and still giving forth his gasping, mysterious comments.

He might well be out of breath, for his whole preposterous raid had gone with one rush; he had bounded the wall once like a football, swept down the garden like a slide, and shot up the tree like a rocket.

The other three men seemed buried under incident piled on incident⁠—a wild world where one thing began before another thing left off.

All three had the first thought. The tree had been there for the five years they had known the boardinghouse. Each one of them was active and strong. No one of them had even thought of climbing it.

Hanging thus head downwards above the unhelmed Warner, he gravely proceeded to drop the battered silk cylinder upon his brows.

“Every man a king,” explained the inverted philosopher, “every hat (consequently) a crown. But this is a crown out of heaven.”

And he again attempted the coronation of Warner, who, however, moved away with great abruptness from the hovering diadem; not seeming, strangely enough, to wish for his former decoration in its present state.

Speaking thus, with a wild comfortableness, he settled or smashed the shapeless silk hat over the face of the disturbed physician, and fell on his feet among the other men, still talking, beaming and breathless.

“Why don’t they make more games out of wind?” he asked in some excitement.

“Kites are all right, but why should it only be kites? Why, I thought of three other games for a windy day while I was climbing that tree. Here’s one of them: you take a lot of pepper—”

The stranger, so far as so loud a person was capable of it, appeared to grow confidential.

“Well, it’s a trick of my own,” he confessed candidly. “I do it by having two legs.”

Arthur Inglewood, who had sunk into the background of this scene of folly, started and stared at the newcomer with his shortsighted eyes screwed up and his high colour slightly heightened.

“Why, I believe you’re Smith,” he cried with his fresh, almost boyish voice; and then after an instant’s stare, “and yet I’m not sure.”

“I have a card, I think,” said the unknown, with baffling solemnity⁠—“a card with my real name, my titles, offices, and true purpose on this earth.”

He drew out slowly from an upper waistcoat pocket a scarlet card-case, and as slowly produced a very large card. Even in the instant of its production, they fancied it was of a queer shape, unlike the cards of ordinary gentlemen.

Last, but the reverse of least, there was Diana Duke, studying the newcomer with eyes of steel, and listening carefully to every idiotic word he said. As for Mrs. Duke, she smiled up at him, but never dreamed of listening to him.

She had never really listened to anyone in her life; which, some said, was why she had survived.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Duke was pleased with her new guest’s concentration of courtesy upon herself; for no one ever spoke seriously to her any more than she listened seriously to anyone.

Fortunately, Mrs. Duke’s more efficient niece and partner was there to complete the contract; for, indeed, all the people of the house had somehow collected in the room. This fact, in truth, was typical of the whole episode.

The visitor created an atmosphere of comic crisis; and from the time he came into the house to the time he left it, he somehow got the company to gather and even follow (though in derision) as children gather and follow a Punch and Judy.

An hour ago, and for four years previously, these people had avoided each other, even when they had really liked each other. They had slid in and out of dismal and deserted rooms in search of particular newspapers or private needlework.

The wind takes off the leaves, but it couldn’t manage the hat; that wind, I suppose, has tidied whole forests today. Rum idea this is, that tidiness is a timid, quiet sort of thing; why, tidiness is a toil for giants.

You can’t tidy anything without untidying yourself; just look at my trousers.

Don’t you know that? Haven’t you ever had a spring cleaning?”

it was a quaintly coloured syrup, such as a child sees in a shop window. He talked dominantly and rushed the social situation; but he was not asserting himself, like a superman in a modern play.

He was simply forgetting himself, like a little boy at a party.

He had somehow made the giant stride from babyhood to manhood, and missed that crisis in youth when most of us grow old.

He talked dominantly and rushed the social situation; but he was not asserting himself, like a superman in a modern play. He was simply forgetting himself, like a little boy at a party.

He had somehow made the giant stride from babyhood to manhood, and missed that crisis in youth when most of us grow old.

As he shunted his big bag, Arthur observed the initials I. S. printed on one side of it, and remembered that Smith had been called Innocent Smith at school, though whether as a formal Christian name or a moral description he could not remember.

and Inglewood and Moon were left alone on the long gray-green ridge of the slate roof, with their feet against gutters and their backs against chimney-pots, looking agnostically at each other.

Their first feeling was that they had come out into eternity, and that eternity was very like topsy-turvydom.

One definition occurred to both of them—that he had come out into the light of that lucid and radiant ignorance in which all beliefs had begun. The sky above them was full of mythology. Heaven seemed deep enough to hold all the gods.

One definition occurred to both of them—that he had come out into the light of that lucid and radiant ignorance in which all beliefs had begun. The sky above them was full of mythology.

Heaven seemed deep enough to hold all the gods.

The round of the ether turned from green to yellow gradually like a great unripe fruit. All around the sunken sun it was like a lemon; round all the east it was a sort of golden green, more suggestive of a greengage;

and realized that the irrepressible Smith must have followed Gould downstairs, for his eager and pleading accents could be heard, followed by the half-humourous protests of Miss Duke and the full and very youthful laughter of Rosamund Hunt.

The air had that cold kindness that comes after a storm.

Michael Moon drank it in with as serious a relish as he had drunk the little bottle of cheap claret, which he had emptied almost at a draught. Inglewood went on eating ginger very slowly and with a solemnity unfathomable as the sky above him.

I even drink about the same amount too much. I go to the same number of public-houses. I meet the same damned women with mauve faces. I hear the same number of dirty stories—generally the same dirty stories.

You may assure my friends, Inglewood, that you see before you a person whom civilization has thoroughly tamed.

”

Who would have thought of that trapdoor? Who would have thought that this cursed colonial claret could taste quite nice among the chimney-pots?

Perhaps that is the real key of fairyland.

Perhaps Nosey Gould’s beastly little Empire Cigarettes ought only to be smoked on stilts, or something of that sort. Perhaps Mrs. Duke’s cold leg of mutton would seem quite appetizing at the top of a tree.

“Let us what?” asked Arthur Inglewood, rising equally quick though somewhat more cautiously, for his friend seemed to find some difficulty in speech.

“Let us go and do some of these things we can’t do,” said Michael.

At the same moment there burst out of the trapdoor below them the cockatoo hair and flushed face of Innocent Smith, calling to them that they must come down as the “concert” was in full swing, and Mr.

“Hullo!” he cried, stepping back from the steely glitter as men step back from a serpent; “are you afraid of burglars? or when and why do you deal death out of that machine gun?”

“Oh, that!” said Smith, throwing it a single glance; “I deal life out of that,” and he went bounding down the stairs.

It is the fashion to talk of institutions as cold and cramping things. The truth is that when people are in exceptionally high spirits, really wild with freedom and invention, they always must, and they always do, create institutions.

When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but while they are gay and vigorous they invariably make rules.

This, which is true of all the churches and republics of history, is also true of the most trivial parlour game or the most unsophisticated meadow romp. We are never free until some institution frees us;

but while they are gay and vigorous they invariably make rules. This, which is true of all the churches and republics of history, is also true of the most trivial parlour game or the most unsophisticated meadow romp.

We are never free until some institution frees us; and liberty cannot exist till it is declared by authority.

Even the wild authority of the harlequin Smith was still authority, because it produced everywhere a crop of crazy regulations and conditions. He filled everyone with his own half-lunatic life; but it was not expressed in destruction, but rather in a dizzy and toppling construction.

But no one had any time to criticize these impromptu estates and offices, for they followed each other in wild succession like the topics of a rambling talker.

Existence with such a man was an obstacle race made out of pleasant obstacles.

Out of any homely and trivial object he could drag reels of exaggeration, like a conjurer. Nothing could be more shy and impersonal than poor Arthur’s photography.

Smith looked at her again and again.

Her eyes and mouth were set in her face the wrong way⁠—which was really the right way.

She had the knack of saying everything with her face: her silence was a sort of steady applause.

Smith looked at her again and again. Her eyes and mouth were set in her face the wrong way—which was really the right way.

She had the knack of saying everything with her face: her silence was a sort of steady applause.

But among the hilarious experiments of that holiday (which seemed more like a week’s holiday than a day’s) one experiment towers supreme, not because it was any sillier or more successful than the others, but because out of this particular folly flowed all of the …

And it is doubtful if she really saw anything more eccentric or inexplicable in Smith’s chimney-pot picnics or crimson sunflowers than she had in the chemicals of Inglewood or the sardonic speeches of Moon.

Courtesy, on the other hand, is a thing that anybody can understand, and Smith’s manners were as courteous as they were unconventional.

She said he was “a real gentleman,” by which she simply meant a kindhearted man, which is a very different thing.

“Don’t you say a word against the ‘Swiss Family Robinson,’ ” cried Innocent with great warmth. “It mayn’t be exact science, but it’s dead accurate philosophy. When you’re really shipwrecked, you do really find what you want.

When you’re really on a desert island, you never find it a desert.

If we were really besieged in this garden, we’d find a hundred English birds and English berries that we never knew were here.

We can make anything a precious metal, as men could in the morning of the world. They didn’t choose gold because it was rare; your scientists can tell you twenty sorts of slime much rarer.

They chose gold because it was bright⁠—because it was a hard thing to find, but pretty when you’ve found it.

You can’t fight with golden swords or eat golden biscuits; you can only look at it—and you can look at it out here.”

“What a mistake that is!” cried Innocent Smith, leaping up in great excitement. “

All is gold that glitters⁠—especially now we are a Sovereign State.

What’s the good of a Sovereign State if you can’t define a sovereign? We can make anything a precious metal, as men could in the morning of the world. They didn’t choose gold because it was rare;

A black button would do just as well. Don’t you see that everything in this garden looks like a jewel? And will you kindly tell me what the deuce is the good of a jewel except that it looks like a jewel?

Leave off buying and selling, and start looking! Open your eyes, and you’ll wake up in the New Jerusalem.

“All is gold that glitters— Tree and tower of brass; Rolls the golden evening air Down the golden grass. Kick the cry to Jericho, How yellow mud is sold; All is gold that glitters, For the glitter is the gold.”

“And who wrote that?” asked Rosamund, amused.

“No one will ever write it,” answered Smith, and cleared the rockery with a flying leap.

“Really,” said Rosamund to Michael Moon, “he ought to be sent to an asylum. Don’t you think so?”

“You are busy,” said Arthur, oddly embarrassed with what he had seen, and wishing to ignore it.

“There’s no time for dreaming in this world,” answered the young lady with her back to him.

“I have been thinking lately,” said Inglewood in a low voice, “that there’s no time for waking up.”

“There’s no time for dreaming in this world,” answered the young lady with her back to him.

“I have been thinking lately,” said Inglewood in a low voice, “that there’s no time for waking up.”

She did not reply, and he walked to the window and looked out on the garden.

Getting under a black hood, getting into a dark room—getting into a hole anyhow. Drugging myself with speed, and sunshine, and fatigue, and fresh air. Pedalling the machine so fast that I turn into a machine myself.

That’s the matter with all of us. We’re too busy to wake up.

”

“There must be!” cried Inglewood, turning round in a singular excitement—“there must be something to wake up to! All we do is preparations—your cleanliness, and my healthiness, and Warner’s scientific appliances.

We’re always preparing for something⁠—something that never comes off.

I ventilate the house, and you sweep the house; but what is going to happen in the house?”

“What other occupation is there for an active man on this earth, except to marry you? What’s the alternative to marriage, barring sleep? It’s not liberty, Rosamund. Unless you marry God, as our nuns do in Ireland, you must marry Man—that is Me.

The only third thing is to marry yourself⁠—yourself, yourself, yourself⁠—the only companion that is never satisfied⁠—and never satisfactory.

”

“Do you mean you want to marry me?” she said.

“Why, there’s a cab at the door!” cried Inglewood, springing up with an unconscious energy and bursting open the glass doors that led into the garden.

As he led her out by the hand they realized somehow for the first time that the house and garden were on a steep height over London. And yet, though they felt the place to be uplifted, they felt it also to be secret:

They existed, like symbols, in an ecstasy of separation. Indeed, every object grew more and more particular and precious because the whole picture was breaking up.

Things look so bright just before they burst.

Long before his fancies had begun, let alone ceased, Arthur had stepped across and taken one of Smith’s arms. Simultaneously the little stranger had run up the steps and taken the other. Smith went into peals of laughter, and surrendered his pistol with perfect willingness.

Well, in a legal inquiry (or a medical inquiry, for that matter) ten to one he won’t be allowed to read them. He’ll be tripped up every two or three minutes with some tangle of old rules.

A man can’t tell the truth in public nowadays. But he can still tell it in private; he can tell it inside that house.

”

It is true that there’s too much official and indirect power.

Often and often the thing a whole nation can’t settle is just the thing a family could settle.

Scores of young criminals have been fined and sent to jail when they ought to have been thrashed and sent to bed. Scores of men, I am sure, have had a lifetime at Hanwell when they only wanted a week at Brighton.

“Why does everybody repeat riddles,” went on Moon abruptly, “even if they’ve forgotten the answers?

Riddles are easy to remember because they are hard to guess.

So were those stiff old symbols in black, red, or green easy to remember because they had been hard to guess. Their colours were plain. Their shapes were plain. Everything was plain except the meaning.”

Riddles are easy to remember because they are hard to guess. So were those stiff old symbols in black, red, or green easy to remember because they had been hard to guess.

Their colours were plain. Their shapes were plain. Everything was plain except the meaning.

”

“There is something pleasing to a mystic in such a land of mirrors. For a mystic is one who holds that two worlds are better than one.

In the highest sense, indeed, all thought is reflection.

“This is the real truth, in the saying that second thoughts are best. Animals have no second thoughts; man alone is able to see his own thought double, as a drunkard sees a lamppost;

man alone is able to see his own thought upside down as one sees a house in a puddle. This duplication of mentality, as in a mirror, is (we repeat) the inmost thing of human philosophy.

There is a mystical, even a monstrous truth, in the statement that two heads are better than one. But they ought both to grow on the same body.

”

It is enough for them (the undersigned persons) if they are able to pursue their own peculiar and profitable theme—which is puddles. What (the undersigned persons ask themselves) is a puddle?

A puddle repeats infinity, and is full of light; nevertheless, if analyzed objectively, a puddle is a piece of dirty water spread very thin on mud.

The two great historic universities of England have all this large and level and reflective brilliance. Nevertheless, or, rather, on the other hand, they are puddles—puddles, puddles, puddles, puddles. The undersigned persons ask you to excuse an emphasis inseparable from strong conviction.”

“ ‘Oh, don’t tell me that!’ cried Smith with the sudden clairvoyance of mental pain; ‘don’t tell me I confuse enjoyment of existence with the Will to Live! That’s German, and German is High Dutch, and High Dutch is Double Dutch.

The thing I saw shining in your eyes when you dangled on that bridge was enjoyment of life and not “the Will to Live.”

What you knew when you sat on that damned gargoyle was that the world, when all is said and done, is a wonderful and beautiful place; I know it, because I knew it at the same minute.

Several times, however, he stood outside the villa with the spotted blinds, studying them intently with his head slightly on one side. Some took him for a lunatic and some for an intending purchaser.

He is not yet sure that the two characters would be widely different.

“The above narrative has been constructed on a principle which is, in the opinion of the undersigned persons, new in the art of letters. Each of the two actors is described as he appeared to the other.

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently, “we admit the chasm.

The old cruel codes accuse a man of theft and send him to prison for ten years. The tolerant and humane ticket accuses him of nothing and sends him to prison forever.

We pass the chasm.”

My decision was violent and simple; yet the thoughts that led up to it were so complicated and contradictory that I could not retrace them now.

I knew Hawkins was a kind, innocent gentleman; and I would have given ten pounds for the pleasure of kicking him down the road.

That God should allow good people to be as bestially stupid as that—rose against me like a towering blasphemy.

But the scene grew subtler with familiarity. We stood above the average of the housetops and saw something of that thing called smoke, which in great cities creates the strange thing called fog. Beneath us rose a forest of chimney-pots.

And there stood in every chimney-pot, as if it were a flowerpot, a brief shrub or a tall tree of coloured vapour.

The colours of the smoke were various; for some chimneys were from firesides and some from factories, and some again from mere rubbish heaps. And yet, though the tints were all varied, they all seemed unnatural, like fumes from a witch’s pot.

“Then I read the writing of the smoke.

Smoke was like the modern city that makes it; it is not always dull or ugly, but it is always wicked and vain.

“Modern England was like a cloud of smoke; it could carry all colours, but it could leave nothing but a stain. It was our weakness and not our strength that put a rich refuse in the sky.

We had taken the sacred circle of the whirlwind, and looked down on it, and seen it as a whirlpool. And then we had used it as a sink. It was a good symbol of the mutiny in my own mind.

Only our worst things were going to heaven. Only our criminals could still ascend like angels.

“As my brain was blinded with such emotions, my guide stopped by one of the big chimney-pots that stood at the regular intervals like lampposts along that uplifted and aerial highway.

By this starry tunnel Santa Claus manages—like the skylark—to be true to the kindred points of heaven and home. Nay, owing to certain conventions, and a widely distributed lack of courage for climbing, this door was, perhaps, little used.

But Santa Claus’s door was really the front door: it was the door fronting the universe.

“I thought this as I groped my way across the black garret, or loft below the roof, and scrambled down the squat ladder that let us down into a yet larger loft below.

“ ‘Man!’ I said, ‘all stealing is toy-stealing. That’s why it’s really wrong.

The goods of the unhappy children of men should be really respected because of their worthlessness.

I know Naboth’s vineyard is as painted as Noah’s Ark. I know Nathan’s ewe-lamb is really a woolly baa-lamb on a wooden stand. That is why I could not take them away.

“After a moment I added abruptly, ‘

Only saints and sages ought to be robbed.

They may be stripped and pillaged; but not the poor little worldly people of the things that are their poor little pride.’

“ ‘Don’t do it!’ I cried. ‘It might be the last bottle of some rotten vintage or other. The master of this house may be quite proud of it.

Don’t you see there’s something sacred in the silliness of such things?

’

“ ‘Too well,’ he answered, with a sadness so strange as to have something eerie about it. ‘

I am always trying to forget what I know⁠—and to find what I don’t know.

’ He drained his glass. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘it will do him good.’

Vomiting as he was with revulsion, from the pessimism that had quailed under his pistol, he made himself a kind of fanatic of the joy of life. He cut across all the associations of serious-minded men. He was gay, but by no means careless.

His practical jokes were more in earnest than verbal ones.

Though not an optimist in the absurd sense of maintaining that life is all beer and skittles, he did really seem to maintain that beer and skittles are the most serious part of it. ‘What is more immortal,’ he would cry, ‘than love and war?

“ ‘I don’t deny,’ he said, ‘that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die.

I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.

The intellectuals among whom I moved were not even alive enough to fear death. They hadn’t enough blood in them to be cowards. Until a pistol barrel was poked under their very noses they never even knew they had been born.

but perhaps one could hardly say that he had settled down. ‘

I am a very domestic fellow,’ he explained with gravity, ‘and have often come in through a broken window rather than be late for tea.

’

“

He lashed his soul with laughter to prevent it falling asleep.

He lost his wife a series of excellent servants by knocking at the door as a total stranger, and asking if Mr. Smith lived there and what kind of a man he was.

Whether they cursed or blessed the world, they have never fitted it. It is true that men have shrunk from the sting of a great satirist as if from the sting of an adder.

But it is equally true that men flee from the embrace of a great optimist as from the embrace of a bear.

Nothing brings down more curses than a real benediction. For the goodness of good things, like the badness of bad things, is a prodigy past speech; it is to be pictured rather than spoken.

It is true that men have shrunk from the sting of a great satirist as if from the sting of an adder. But it is equally true that men flee from the embrace of a great optimist as from the embrace of a bear.

Nothing brings down more curses than a real benediction.

For the goodness of good things, like the badness of bad things, is a prodigy past speech; it is to be pictured rather than spoken.

“I have no sympathy with eccentrics or poets. A man of sense looks for beauty in things deliberately intended to be beautiful, such as a trim flowerbed or an ivory statuette.

One does not permit beauty to pervade one’s whole life, just as one does not pave all the roads with ivory or cover all the fields with geraniums. My faith, but we should miss the onions!

“But whether I read things backwards through my memory, or whether there are indeed atmospheres of psychology which the eye of science cannot as yet pierce, it is the humiliating fact that on that particular evening I felt like a poet—like any little rascal of …

“ ‘Science!’ cried the stranger. ‘

There is only one good thing science ever discovered⁠—a good thing, good tidings of great joy⁠—that the world is round.

’

Oh! I know some say it was no good, and you’re just back where you were before. Why, blast it all, that’s just where we all want to be—back where we were before! That is revolution—going right round!

Every revolution, like a repentance, is a return.

’

“ ‘I have left it,’ he said very sadly. ‘

It was not the house that grew dull, but I that grew dull in it.

My wife was better than all women, and yet I could not feel it.’

“ ‘The Doll’s House!’ he cried vehemently; ‘why, that is just where Ibsen was so wrong!

Why, the whole aim of a house is to be a doll’s house.

Don’t you remember, when you were a child, how those little windows were windows, while the big windows weren’t. A child has a doll’s house, and shrieks when a front door opens inwards.

I have found out how to turn a house into a doll’s house. Get a long way off it:

God lets us turn all things into toys by his great gift of distance.

Once let me see my old brick house standing up quite little against the horizon, and I shall want to go back to it again.

I have been a bit unconventional in my time! Why, Nietzsche stood in a row of ramrods in the silly old Prussian army, and Shaw takes temperance beverages in the suburbs; but the things I do are unprecedented things.

This round road I am treading is an untrodden path.

I do believe in breaking out; I am a revolutionist. But don’t you see that all these real leaps and destructions and escapes are only attempts to get back to Eden—to something we have had, to something we at least have heard of?

I do believe in breaking out; I am a revolutionist. But don’t you see that all these real leaps and destructions and escapes are only attempts to get back to Eden—to something we have had, to something we at least have heard of?

Don’t you see one only breaks the fence or shoots the moon in order to get home?

’

I am indeed in one place, for my uncle took me to this temple when I was a boy, and in this I shall doubtless die.

But if a man remain in one place he shall see that the place changes.

The pagoda of my temple stands up silently out of all the trees, like a yellow pagoda above many green pagodas. But the skies are sometimes blue like porcelain, and sometimes green like jade, and sometimes red like garnet.

“I dare say that living under the very top of the Sierras has an odd effect on the mind; one tends to think of those lonely rocks not as peaks coming to a point, but rather as pillars holding up heaven itself.

Straight cliffs sail up and away beyond the hope of the eagles; cliffs so tall that they seem to attract the stars and collect them as sea-crags collect a mere glitter of phosphorous.

These terraces and towers of rock do not, like smaller crests, seem to be the end of the world. Rather they seem to be its awful beginning: its huge foundations.

“ ‘You may judge for yourself,’ he answered. ‘

I am a man who left his own house because he could no longer bear to be away from it.

’

“ ‘My pilgrimage is not yet accomplished,’ he replied sadly. ‘

I have become a pilgrim to cure myself of being an exile.

’

“I can tell,” said Michael savagely, out of the gloom. “

Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline.

”

The Missing Link and all that is well enough for kids, but I’m talking about things we know here.

All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing⁠—and he won’t be missed either.

I know all about his human head and his horrid tail; they belong to a very old game called ‘Heads I win, tails you lose.’ If you do find a fellow’s bones, it proves he lived a long while ago;