“I thank God daily for the good fortune of my birth, for I am certain I would have made a miserable peasant.”

“Yet if he had been asked… if he were happy… He would have admitted readily enough that he was uncomfortable, that he was cold, and badly fed, and venomous; that his clothes were in rags, and his feet and knees and elbows raw and bleeding through much walking and crawling; that he was in ever-present peril of life, and that he really did not expect to survive the adventure he was about to thrust himself into voluntarily, but all this had nothing to do with happiness: that was something he never stopped to think about.”

“When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument.”

“The cork was in the bottle. He and the Atropos were trapped.”

“I thank God daily for the good fortune of my birth, for I am certain I would have made a miserable peasant.”