Pongileoni's blowing and the scraping of the anonymous fiddlers had shaken the air in the great hall, had set the glass of the windows looking on to it vibrating; and this in turn had shaken the air in Lord Edward's apartment on the further side. The shaking air rattled Lord Edward's membrana tympani; the interlocked malleus, incus, and stirrup bones were set in motion so as to agitate the membrane of the oval window and raise an infinitesimal storm in the fluid of the labyrinth. The hairy endings of the auditory nerve shuddered like weeds in a rough sea; a vast number of obscure miracles were performed in the brain, and Lord Edward ecstatically whispered "Bach!"

"Mystical experience and aestheticism. The fornicator's hatred of life in a new form."

"What shall I do when I'm old?" she suddenly asked.

"Why not die?" suggested Spandrell with his mouth full of bread and Strasbourg goose liver.

"But why should two people be unhappy?"' persisted the barmaid. "When it isn't necessary?"

"Why shouldn't they be unhappy?" Spandrell enquired. "Perhaps it's what they're here for. How do you know that the earth isn't some other planet's hell?"

A positivist, the barmaid laughed. "What rot!"

I disbelieve in the adequacy of any scientific or philosophical theory, any abstract moral principle, but on scientific, philosophical, and abstract-moral grounds.

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.

The bathroom was drenched with their splashings. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.

— Last lines

Critique • Quotes