“The man could be frightfully keen…except when he was utterly obtuse.”

“If a man cannot make his point to keen boys in ten minutes, he ought to be shot!”

“He never went mad in your sense. My dear fellow, you're very much wrong if you think there was anything pathological about him — then. The man was brilliantly sane. His mind was as keen as a keen sword. I couldn't understand him, but I could judge of his sanity right enough.”

“No man had ever heard a nightingale,
When once a keen-eyed naturalist was stirred
To study and define — what is a bird.”

“Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old…

- Wang Lung”

“…he knew there wasn't a soul in the mob he could trust – except perhaps Dallow. That didn't matter. You couldn't make mistakes when you trusted nobody.”

“A drowning man cannot be saved until he is utterly exhausted and ceases to make the slightest effort to save himself.”

“The barber man was small and flash, as barbers mostly are,
He wore a strike-your-fancy sash, he smoked a huge cigar;
He was a humorist of note and keen at repartee,
He laid the odds and kept a "tote", whatever that may be,
And when he saw our friend arrive, he whispered, "Here's a lark!
Just watch me catch him all alive, this man from Ironbark."”

“Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it.”

“He never felt lonliness except when he was happy.”