Just then the nightingale began to sing again, and curiously enough it seemed to him that a different note had crept into the bird's song.

It was a cry for life, an absolutely pagan note, which came to him through the velvety darkness.
"Isn't it your theory," she whispered, "to destroy for the sake of the future?
Don't do it.

Theory sometimes sounds so sublime, but the present is actually here.

Be content to work piecemeal, to creep upwards inch by inch.

Life is something, you know.