“And the sad act like lepers
They stick to the shadows
They long to ring bells of warning
To tell of their coming
So that the pure can shut their doors.”

“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.”

“The little White Chapel
Is ringing its bell
With a ring-a-ding-dong,
All day long”

“so much of the world is plunged in darkness and chaos…

So ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”

“The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.”

“Placing your stick at the end of the shadow of the pyramid, you made by the sun's rays two triangles, and so proved that the pyramid [height] was to the stick [height] as the shadow of the pyramid to the shadow of the stick.”

“At this time, space was supposed to be filled with an ether, a substance which might well serve, among other functions, to transmit forces across space. So long as such an ether could be called on, the transmission of force to a distance was easy to understand; it was like ringing a distant bell by pulling a bell-rope.”

“In the end, coming to faith remains for all a sense of homecoming, of picking up the threads of a lost life, of responding to a bell that had long been ringing, of taking a place at a table that had long been vacant.”

“I pretended I was Cat Stevens. I started out with very Cat Stevensy chords, very abrupt. I was so stuck in the moment of being fearful so as a lesson to myself I said: ‘but we can never know about the days to come’. I didn’t know when the door-bell was going to ring. I liked that. It was all of a sudden a quarter to eight and I had written the whole song.”

“Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.”