Ricky: You are the strangest man alive.

...and all the people said 'What a shame that he's dead, but wasn't he a most peculiar man?

"That man is … odd," I dared say to William.
"He is, or has been, in many ways a great man. But for this very reason he is odd. It is only petty men who seem normal."

C'est un parleur étrange, et qui trouve toujours L'art de ne vous rien dire avec de grands discours.

Here it is interesting to remark that if at the present time you were to ask any of the beings there about this writer, he would certainly recognize his name and speak of him as an extraordinary being. “But if you went on to ask what he had written, it would turn out that most of them, if of course they confessed the truth, had never read a single one of his books. “All the same they would talk about him and discuss him, and splutteringly insist that he was a being with an unparalleled mind and a phenomenal knowledge of the psyche of the beings dwelling on the planet Earth.

His persona seemed very odd to me: it was as though he’d once seen an intellectual, and had spent the rest of his life impersonating him.

In my experience - and this is a very awkward way to put it, since I don't really know what the word experience means - the strangest people in one's life are the people one has known and loved, still know and will always love. Here, both I and the vocabulary are both in trouble, for strangest does not imply stranger. A stranger is a stranger is a stranger, simply, and you watch the stranger to anticipate his next move. But the people who elicit from you a depth of attention and wonder which we helplessly call love are perpetually making moves which cannot possibly be anticipated. Eventually, you realize that it never occurred to you to anticipate their next move, not only because you couldn't but because you didn't have to: it was not a question of moving on the next move, but simply, of being present. Danger, true, you try to anticipate and you prepare yourself, without knowing it, to stand in the way of death. For the strangest people in the world are those people recognized, beneath one's senses, by one's soul - the people utterly indispensable for one's journey.

All through his life, he swung between the ridiculous and the sublime,

C'est un parleur étrange, et qui trouve toujours
L'art de ne vous rien dire avec de grands discours.

His conversation was full of imagination, and very often in limitation of ther Persian, and Arabic writers, he invented tales of wonderful fancy and passion. At other times he repeated my fsvorite poems or drew me out into arguments, wich he suported with great ingenuity.

He possessed a peculiar talent of producing effect in whatever he said or did.

Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.

Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

In this connection, it is interesting to remark that I, as well as many others, noticed that when he himself used these sayings in conversation, it always seemed to every hearer that they could not have been more apt or better put, but that if anyone else made use of them, they seemed to be entirely beside the point or improbable nonsense.