for fun

selected quotes from Shadows of Ecstacy, enjoy.

Sir Bernard nodded, and sat down leisurely. "Roger told us how he liked poetry," he said, "and the explorer told us how he liked himself, and Mr. Nigel Considine told us how he disliked the University"
"Not in so many words?" Philip asked.
"Contrapuntal," Sir Bernard said, "When you've heard as many speeches as I have, you'll find that's the only interest in them: the intermingling of the theme proposed and the theme actual."

"Certainly unhappy," Sir Bernard said. "He's fanatic enough to believe passionately and not sufficiently fanatical to believe that other people ought to believe. Naturally also, being young, he thinks his own belief is the only real way of salvation, though he'd deny that if you asked him. So he's in a continual unsuccessful emotional conflict, and therefore he's unhappy."

A thing might not be true because it appeared so to him, but it was no less likely to be true because everyone else denied it. The eyes of Rosamund might or might not hold the secret origin of day and night, but if they apparently did then they apparently did, and it would be silly to deny it and equally silly not to relish it.

"The Socratic method doesn't really help one to choose a frock. I know because I tried it once. I said, 'Must not a colour which suits me, and a cut that I admire, be desirable? It would seem so, Socrates.' And yet it wasn't."

Sir Bernard thought, "We can't possibly stop here. We don't know where Considine's gone, we don't know whether he's coming back, and I should hate him to have to worry the exalted imagination with such a detail as what to do with us. He might want us for some new experiment in the conquest of death."