You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently s… - Robert Louis Stevenson

You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others...

No, sir. I make it a rule of mine: The more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.

If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences—for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect—if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack!

I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.

I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.