He spoke in a low weak voice. 'God is dead,' Peter understood him to say. Peter sat up. ' I know that,' he protested. 'And you didn't say that anyway… - Mary McCarthy

Our anti-Communism came to us neither as the fruit of a special wisdom nor as a humiliating awakening from a prolonged deception, but as a natural event, the product of chance and propinquity. One thing followed another, and the will had little to say about it. For my part, during that year, I realized, with a certain wistfulness, that it was too late for me to become any kind of Marxist. Marxism, I saw, from the learned young man I listened to at Committee meetings, was something you had to take up young, like ballet dancing.

I learned long ago," she stoutly reiterated, "that one can't bargain in these affairs. If one wants to be effective, one hands in one's resignation and clears out. There's no other way for a man or an institution to learn that one is serious than to learn it too late.

Among Venice's spells is one of peculiar potency: the power to awaken the philistine dozing in the skeptic's breast. People of this kind — dry, prose people of superior intelligence — object to feeling what they are supposed to feel, in the presence of marvels. They wish to feel something else. The extreme of this position is to feel nothing.