He had more on his mind than his mind could hold.

She confused him and hindered the flow of his ideas. Self-expression had never seemed at once so desirable and so impossible.

"Ridiculous," he said breathlessly. "You ought to give up detecting and try fantasy writing."

I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.

There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.

All his leisure clothes were absurd — jokes, really — as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.

Most of us find it starkly ludicrous that the height of all possible ambition, to the ungifted, must be to drape oneself in crowns and robes.

Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.

Pure literature seemed beyond his scope, yet he was constantly endeavouring to express himself.

This was fantastic, insane—contrary to the axioms of her existence.

the human imagination soon got caught up in the most ridiculous ichthyological fantasies.

It was an awful thought to go and sit there among logical positivists ...

By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard it in an echo of the infuriated cries within him.

I consider it absurd that we should permit our senses to sate themselves without hindrance with their own material food, but that we should exclude the mind alone from its own particular activity.