“In a word, the heavy weight upon his spirits kept everything in order, not merely within his own system, but wheresoever the iron accents of the church clock were audible.”

“There is within every human being a deep well of thinking over which a heavy iron lid is kept clamped.”

“She spoke, they were but a few hurried words —
Of the sweet flowers around, the heat, the night —
Yet were they such as the blest heart records
For many an after-moment's long delight;
They touch'd upon his spirit's inmost chords;
Though broken was the sense, the accents light,
Yet sweeter was to him that tremulous tone
Than all that eloquence were proud to own.”

“The towers shine in a larger blue, and the portals bloom with a mystic light. Silence was ordered and mute in terror fell the world. From on high he begins. His holy words have weight heavy and immutable and the Fates follow his voice.”
Radiant majore sereno culmina et arcano florentes lumine postes. postquam jussa quies siluitque exterritus orbis, incipit ex alto: grave et inmutabile sanctis pondus adest verbis, et vocem fata sequuntur.

“The word … becomes "one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions.”

“Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.”

“Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights.”

“The summer was heavy with a kind of soft grey-blue weight in the sky—yet not in the sky, for it was as though there were no sky, but only air, an impalpable grey-blue substance, drugged with the weight of its own heat and hue.”

“I was quite insistent. We have quite a few pranksters in the lab and I thought this was one of them. I even congratulated the man, ironically, on his Swedish accent.”

“It is ironic to watch the churches, including large sections of my own religion, surrendering to the spirit of modernity at the very moment when modernity itself is undergoing a kind of spiritual collapse….”