Grass and garden trees seemed glittering with something at once good and unnatural like a fire from fairyland. It seemed like a strange sunrise at the wrong end of the day.

Extremely quotable, excessively enjoyable, occasionally mystifying. Not quite on a level with the other Chesterton novellas I've read but vastly better than most modern literature. Full of northernness and the aching beauty of goodness midst evil. Well worth the read.

Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.

"Imprudent marriages! And pray where in earth or heaven are there any prudent marriages? You never know a husband till you marry him. Unhappy! Of course you'll be unhappy! Who the devil are you that you shouldn't be unhappy, like the mother that bore you?"

"You spoke with authority, and not as the scribes. Nobody could comfort me if you said there was no comfort. If you really thought there was nothing anywhere, it was because you had been there to see. Don't you see that I had to prove you didn't really mean it? Or else drown myself in the canal."

"I don't want people to anticipate me as a well-known practical joke. I want both my gifts to come virgin and violent, the death and the life after death. I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him. Only to bring him to life."

"Every revolution — like every repentance —is a return... My revolution, like yours, like the earth's, will end up in the holy, happy place, the celestial, incredible place — the place where we were before."

"I do believe in breaking out; I am a revolutionist. But don't you see that all these real leaps and destructions and escapes are only attempts to get back to Eden — to something we have had, to something at least we have heard of? Don't you see one only breaks the fence or shoots the moon in order to get home?"

We are all in exile, and no earthly home can cure the holy homesickness that forbids us rest.

"God bade me love one spot and serve it... so that this one spot might be a witness against all the infinities and the sophistries, that Paradise is somewhere and not anywhere, is something and not anything."

The man's spiritual power has been precisely this: that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.