A little thing, lasting only a second, and the odds were a thousand to one that I might have had my eyes on my cards at the time and missed it. But I… - John Buchan

Remember his mind and no other part of him lived in his new world. He said it gave him an odd sense of detachment to sit in a room among people, and to know that nothing there but himself had any relation at all to the infinite strange world of Space that flowed around them. He would listen, he said, to a great man talking, with one eye on the cat on the rug, thinking to himself how much more the cat knew than the man.

He had just the same narrow head, and stubborn mouth, and honest, quick-tempered eyes. It is the type that makes dashing regimental officers, and earns V.C.’s, and gets done in wholesale. I was never that kind. I belonged to the school of the cunning cowards.

We are all, even the best of us, egoists and self-deceivers, and without a little comfortable make-believe to clothe us we should freeze in the outer winds.