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Part of the load on her was the seemingly endless word play of those around her -- the concept juggling.

Could it be that we think we know all there is to know about [Rome's great fire in 64 AD]? Who, after all, has not heard the story about the mad emperor Nero setting fire to Rome and then fiddling while the city burned around him, only for him to blame the Christians for the fire and to make human torches of them?

When I was there all those years ago,I was told that people who went there were in danger of going missing. This was followed by a story about a man who ignored everything he'd heard about the area and went there contrary to all warnings. He was never seen again.

More than ever it seemed to him that trying to grasp what mattered most to human beings was like grabbing at sunbeams; they disappeared at he same time as one was still enjoying them, and one could never get a grip on them.

Thus did the blank spaces of my memory gradually fill with names that, as they arranged and composed themselves in relation to one another, and as the connections between them became more and more numerous, resembled those perfected works of art in which there is not a single brush stroke that does not contribute to the whole...

The creatures who have played an important part in one's life rarely drop out of it for good, just like that. They come back into it from time to time (so much so that people start believing in the renewal of former love) before leaving it forever.

If, in the salon of Mme de Villeparisis, as in the Combray church on the day of Mlle Percepied's wedding, had difficulty rediscovering in the lovely, all-too-human face of Mme de Guermantes the enigma of her name, I thought at least that, when she spoke, her conversation would be profound and mysterious, strange as a medieval tapestry or a Gothic window.

With these two disparate elements in mind (because I had known "Rachel, when of the Lord" in a brothel), I realized that many women to whom men devote everything, for whom they suffer and take their own lives, may be in themselves, or for others, what Rachel was for me. The idea that anyone could be painfully consumed with curiosity in regard to her life dumbfounded me.

I had been thinking earlier that if I had not enjoyed my first experiencing of La Berma it was because, as with my earlier experiences with Gilberte in the Champs-Elysees, I had approached it with too strong a desire.

Walter got home a little after eleven. The house had no light. He went upstairs and found the bedroom empty. He went downstairs, still half expecting to see Clara's suitcase, or some sign of her in the living room.

And then I knew that Marlin shared with the Pharaohs that strange eternity of the body that only Egypt and the Irish bog can give. Centuries hence, when we are all mouldered away, some turf-cutter will find Mrlin there and will look on a face and a figure untouched by all those years, even as though the body had obeyed the dream after all.

An Englishman honours the law, and a very convenient thing it is for everyone that he does so; but it's a dull thing when all's said. Now an Irishman will honour a song, if it's worth honouring, though his doing so is of no convenience to anybody; but he'll never honour the law....

Well, when a guy picks out a dame for himself he's in love with something in himself that hasn't got anything to do with the dame. She looks like his mother, or she's dark and he's scared of blondes, or maybe he's getting even with somebody, or maybe he ain't quite sure he's a man and has to prove it.

[Fabius Maximus:] Every day that passes makes us better, wiser, firmer. Hannibal, on the contrary, is on foreign soil, far from home and country, surrounded by every menace, every danger; for him there is no peace on land and sea; no towns receive him, no protecting walls.

I quailed at the thought of putting on clothes that had frozen solid. 'You don't enjoy all of travelling, do you?' asked Rachel maliciously, watching me hammer the ice off my jeans before struggling into them.

There was no stirring of a breeze, no whisper of running water: the stillness was so unflawed that it seemed the sovereign moon, floating high, must have put a spell on our whole world.

Samuel Johnson was 'a hardened and shameless tea drinker, who has for twenty years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant, whose kettle has scarcely time to cool, who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and with tea welcomes the morning.'

Then I think this country [Chile] went to hell years ago, and the reason we're here, those of us who stayed, is to have nightmares, just because someone had to stay and face up to them.

We die, my Friend,
Nor we alone, but that which each man loved
And prized in his particular nook of earth
Dies with him or is changed, and very soon
Even of the good is no memorial left.

We heard a strange sound in the Bainriggs wood, as we were floating on the water; it seemed in the wood, but it must have been above it
presently we saw a raven very high above us. It called out, and the dome
of the sky seemed to echo the sound. It called again and again as it
flew onwards, and the mountains gave back the sound, seeming as if from
their centre; a musical bell-like answering to the bird's hoars

If no other veto is laid upon us except ' Do not wake the baby ',
it follows that any occupation, such as directing a smooth and soundless flow of treacle into the works of the piano, or cutting off all the hair of the little girls next door and turning it into artificial beards for private theatricals—it follows, I say, that all these were tacitly permitted.

[Vachel Lindsay] did not get drunk only on the American air; he drank the air of a strange paradise, which is in some way set apart and unlike anything in the New World or the Old; a fairy sea, calmed as by a spell, that stretches far away into fantastical China and of which the nearer coast is ruled by ghosts rather than by its modern rulers.

There are eight kinds of people, Nagasena, who when talking a matter over, spoil the discussion. And who are the eight? He who walks in lust, he who walks in ill-will, he who walks in delusion, he who walks in pride, the greedy man, the sluggard, the man of one idea, and the fool.

[W]hatever has in itself the necessity of beginning, that too has also the inherent quality of passing away.

So gradually did he maneuver that he went over the edge into a deep abyss of passion without even knowing it. No wonder: when cruel love is still only a little flame, its early heat's a delight. But the fuel of the beloved's steady presence makes it blaze up, and then there's no controlling how hot it gets, and it reduces its victims to charred flesh.

What relief is there still to seek, what forces could I bring to my aid in this calamity? Not even these goddesses, however willing, could support me in my sorry canvassing.

And about these additional, miscellaneous, and even inferior works of Dickens there is, moreover, another use and fascination which all Dickensians will understand; which, after a manner, is not for the profane. All who love Dickens have a strange sense that he is really inexhaustible.

We were within pistol shot of one of a group of islands whose ferocious inhabitants closed in upon the doomed and helpless Captain Cook and murdered him, eighty-seven years ago; and lo! their descendants were at church! Behold what the missionaries have wrought!

[W]e realized that the warnings we had been given about Andean roads ... had not been all exaggeration. As if to emphasize the lesson, one of the sharpest corners was decorated by a cluster of small wooden crosses. 'A truck went over,' the driver explained, grinning. 'Many Indians were killed.'

Unhappy pitiful degenerates with uncoordinated movements.