“That’s not all. When madam come back yesterday afternoon from having tea with Miss Todd, she saw three cups going downstairs.”

Stoker paused to let this sink in. Laura wondered if Miss Grey had been drunk or seen visions and dreamed dreams, but realizing that this was only Stoker’s way of saying that Annie had been carrying the tea-things down to the kitchen, she waited with interest for the sequel.

– Angela Thirkell, High Rising –

She could not explain in so many words, but she felt that those who prepare for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.  It is necessary to prepare for an examination, or a dinner-party, or a possible fall in the price of stock: those who attempt human relations must adopt another method, or fail.

– E.M. Forster, Howards End –

Children superbly allow themselves to become deaf, so to speak, to undesirable circumstances; most frequently, of course, to undesirable circumstances in the way of parental direction; so that fathers, mothers, nurses, or governesses, not comprehending that this mental deafness is for the time being entirely genuine, are liable to hoarseness both of throat and temper.

– Booth Tarkington, Gentle Julia –

Ay, sir; to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.

– William Shakespeare, Hamlet –

The highest function of humanity is belief, that activity of spirit that proceeds upon the pathway of reason, until it comes to some great promontory, and then spreads its wings, and upon the basis of its earlier journeying, takes eternity into its grasp.

– G. Cambell Morgan, The Gospel According to Mark –

Everything about him is interrogative—eyebrows, smile, set of his head, the way he looks at people out of his narrow greenish-gray eyes, his entire personality. If you feel a kind of question-mark atmosphere coming into the room, you can look around, and there’s Sherry.

– Eloise Jarvis McGraw, Greensleeves –

I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to “I hate to read new books,” and I hollered “Comrade!” to whoever owned it before me.

– Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road –

“No human ingenuity can successfully imitate the Providence of God. It is only an infinite intelligence that can understand the complete relation of one event to another. Only God can make a thing happen so that it is consistent with all other things. When a man, in his egotism, undertakes to do a work which can only be accomplished by the Providence of God, he always fails to his ruin.”

– Melville Davisson Post, The Nameless Thing –

MISS SUSAN. What is algebra exactly; is it those three cornered things?

PHOEBE. It is x minus y equals z plus y and things like that. And all the time you are saying they are equal, you feel in your heart, why should they be.

-J.M. Barrie, Quality Street –

For not till the floor of the skies is split,

And hell-fire shines through the sea,

Or the stars look up through the rent earth’s knees,

Cometh such rending of certainties,

As when one wise man truly sees

What is more wise than he.

– G.K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse –