“Was it possible that Ranulph, too, was a real person, a person inside whose mind things happened? He had thought that he himself was the only real person in a field of human flowers. For Master Nathaniel that was a moment of surprise, triumph, tenderness, alarm.”

“Mad folks are often as dangerous as bad ones.”

“So fine a medicine is the will to action.”

“Sentimentality is a quality that rarely has the slightest influence on action.”

“A bad conscience makes a very good ghost.”

“Let mental suffering be intense enough, and it becomes a sort of carminative.”

“It shocked his sense of dramatic economy that they should have to resort to violence when the same result could have been obtained by a minimum expenditure of energy.”

“But these are sad times, the 'prentices wanting to be masters, and every little tradesman wanting to be a Senator, and every dirty little urchin thinking he can giveimpudence to his betters!”

“And there you sit, gloating over what you have done, as if you were a martyr or a public benefactor -- as complacent and smug and misunderstood as a princess from the moon forced to herd goats!”

“A house with old furniture has no need of ghosts to be haunted.”

“The cattle crouched round them in soft shadowy clumps, placidly munching, and dreaming with wide-open eyes. The narrow zone of colour created by the firelight was like the planet Earth - a little freak of brightness in a universe of impenetrable shadows”