Merrick belonged to that class of reader who was able to forget with amazing ease the hand moving the characters behind the scenes of the novel.

Why had his mother gone to the trouble of bringing him into the world if the most exciting moment in his life was having been made lame by a bayonet?

...the wrath of God pales beside that of man.

Time is a river sweeping away all that is born towards the darkest shore.

There is little more I can add short of dissecting the man, or going into intimate details such as the modest proportions and slight southeasterly curvature of his manhood.

Because between doing something and doing nothing, this is all I can do.

And so everything depends on you, Bertie. Bishop or rook. Your life or mine. Do what you believe you have to do.

...but there are stories that cannot begin at their beginning, and perhaps this is one of them.

Very often, we let little things spoil some of our most important treasures—our Moment, our Day, our Life.

She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.

Health food makes me sick.

I want to be the king of sprints because I think I am.

Pieces of intelligence, scraps of intelligence...you run down leads and you run down leads, and you hope that sometimes it works.

The blind cannot see the sun.

Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsociable man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good.

All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.

The way I approach things is from an experimental folk music standpoint. I was obsessed with the Beatles as a kid.

Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It's truly unbelievable.