Some quotations,” said Zellaby, “are greatly improved by lack of context.

I’m a reliable witness, you’re a reliable witness, practically all God’s children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation–which makes it funny how such different ideas of the same affair get about.

But not she. Her eternity is an article of her faith. Great wars and disasters can ebb and flow, races rise and fall, empires wither with suffering and death, but these are superficialities: she, woman,...

It seemed to me an odd view to take – rather as if one should protest that one didn’t LIKE the idea of dying or being born. I preferred the notion of finding out first...

Exactly,” she agreed.

But, as I understand it, your God is a universal God; He is God on all suns and all planets. Surely, then, He must have universal form? Would it not be a staggering vanity to...

It must be, I thought, one of the race’s most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that “it can’t happen here” — that one’s own time and place is beyond cataclysm.

I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that man’s supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the brain’s capacity...

Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence.

Children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at.

Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative—an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary… That day I had learned that it was much more. It was something which could press...

What do you think it is that makes a man”I started on the Definition. He cut me of after five words.”It is not!” he said. “A wax figure could have all that, and he’d still...

To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim it, to outrage its nature. The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it....

We’ve got to believe that God is sane, Davie boy. We’d be lost indeed if we didn’t do that.

…after all, what is a planet but an island in space?

We all have our youthful follies, embarassing to recall — but people somehow find it hard to dismiss as a youthful folly anything that has happened to be a financial success.

You can’t kill an idea the way they try to. You can keep it down awhile, but sooner or later it’ll come out. Now what you’ve got to understand is that the wheel’s not evil....