← When a book about the literature of the eighteen-nineties was given by Mr. Holbrook Jackson to the world, I looked eagerly in the index for Soames, Enoch. 🔊
← And how can I write about Enoch Soames without making him ridiculous? 🔊
← I used to keep it lying carelessly on the table in my room, and whenever a friend took it up and asked what it was about, I would say: "Oh, it's rather a remarkable book. 🔊
← Just "what it was about" I never was able to say. 🔊
← After exchanging a few words, I said with a glance to the open book, "I see I am interrupting you," and was about to pass on, 🔊
← I felt as one who is about to be examined viva voce on the very subject in which he is shakiest. 🔊
← But there was still a spiritual pathos about him, sharpened for me now by the possibility that even the praises of The Preston Telegraph might not have been forthcoming had he not been the son of a Preston man. 🔊
← A dead man can't read the books that are written about him. 🔊
← "You are pleased to sneer," said the devil, who had also risen, "but it is one thing to write about an impossible machine; it is a quite other thing to be a supernatural power." 🔊
← I remember saying at last that if indeed I was destined to write about him, the supposed "stauri" had better have at least a happy ending. 🔊