As a boy, I remember serials in Chums (an English paper for schoolboys which is now extinct) in which a Terrible Trio — comprising a conjuror boy, a … - Robertson Davies

The new priest in his whitish lab-coat gives you nothing at all except a constantly changing vocabulary which he — because he usually doesn't know any Greek — can't pronounce, and you are expected to trust him implicitly because he knows what you are too dumb to comprehend. It's the most overweening, pompous priesthood mankind has ever endured in all its recorded history, and its lack of symbol and metaphor and its zeal for abstraction drive mankind to a barren land of starved imagination.

My lifelong involvement with Mrs Dempster began at 5:58 o'clock p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old.

There are great numbers of people to whom the act of reading a book — any sort of book — is wondrous; they speak of the reader in the tone of warm approbation which they use otherwise when referring to pregnant women, or the newly dead.