“The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.”

He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life,where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one’s waking life was spent watching one’s feet.

The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.

Together, joined in effort by the burden, they staggered up the last steep of the mountain. Together, they chanted One! Two! Three! and crashed the log on to the great pile. Then they stepped back, laughing with triumphant pleasure.

Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!

Graham Greene at 82 years old was still writing, and I don’t think anyone can deny the force, the expertise, and the unique quality of his writing, if you take his complete oeuvre.

Of the authors writing in English, I’d mention Shakespeare and Milton. But all this is terribly high-hat and makes me sound very po-faced, I’m afraid; however, I just happen to like these enormous, swinging, great creatures.

There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.

Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.

There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.

His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.

Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.

It may be — I hope it is — redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable.

This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we’ll have fun.

And I’ve been wearing specs since I was three.

He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.

I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

Not to be confused with the Ukrainian hunting spider, which actually has got a limp and is, as such, completely harmless, and a little bit bitter about the whole thing.

The trouble was, my feelings for patch weren’t harmless.

He grinned. Busted. Im a monster. Jev is my deceptively harmless and shockingly handsome alter ego. And im on top of it, she announced with witty triumph. Is that a freudian slip? His bluntness caught her off guard. A self-conscious blush rose in her face.

Busted. I’m a monster. Jev is my deceptively harmless-and shockingly handsome-alter ego.

All lying – you may think a lie is harmless, but you put them all together and there’s a calamity.

I’m harmless. I don’t have any ill will or ill thought towards anybody. When people know you’re that way, you can say stuff that the creepy guy at your office could never get away with.