Book//mark – The Man Who Was Thursday | G. K. Chesterton (1908)

…

“Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.”

“The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.”

“I could forgive you even your cruelty if it were not for your calm.”

“Sunday is a fixed star,“ he said. “You shall see him a falling star,” said Syme, and put on his hat.

“He defended respectability with violence and exaggeration.”

“A naked moon stood in a naked sky.”

“You say you are a poet of law; I saw you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden”

“I am not good at deception,’ said Tuesday gloomily, flushing. Right, my boy, right,’ said the President with a ponderous heartiness, ‘You aren’t good at anything.”

“Evil philosopher is not trying to alter things but to annihilate them.”

“His swarthy figure stood dark against a square of sunlight, almost like an allegorical figure of labour frescoed on a ground of gold.”

“We must have several word-signs,“ said Syme seriously – “words that we are likely to want, fine shades of meaning. My favourite word is ‘coeval.’ What’s yours?”

“For even the most dehumanized modern fantasies depend on some older and simpler figure; the adventures may be mad, but the adventurer must be sane.”

“Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.”

“Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung; The world was very old indeed when you and I were young.”

“Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not quite coward enough to admire it.”

“He felt he was in possession of some impossible good news, which made every other triviality, but an adorable triviality.”

“The girl with the red hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, with great unconscious gravity of a girl.”

“We are not buffoons, but very desperate men at war with a vast conspiracy.”

“No man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.”

“For these disguises did not disguise, but reveal.”

“Confetti, bonbons, artillery.”