"Do you consider love the strongest emotion?"
"Do you know a stronger?
"Yes, interest."

"The light in the temple is a sheer delusion, and I shall die calmly, like a German, in the black and forgotten depths. This daemoniac laughter which I hear as I write comes only from my own weakening brain. So I will carefully don my diving suit and walk boldly up the steps into that primal shrine; that silent secret of unfathomed waters and uncounted years."

"And in the twilight, as the stars come out one by one and the moon cast on the marsh a radiance like that which a child sees quivering on the floor as he is rocked to sleep at evening, therew walked into the lethal quicksands a very old man in tattered purple, crowned with withered vine-leaves and gazing ahead as if upon the golden domes of a fair city where dreams are understood. That night something of youth and beauty died in the elder world."

"He reigns there still, will reign happily forever, though below the cliffs at Innsmouth the channel tides played mockingly with the body of a tramp who had stumbled through the half-deserted village at dawn; played mockingly, and cast it upon the rocks by ivy-covered Trevor Towers, where a notably fat and especially offensive millionaire brewer enjoys the purchased atmosphere of extinct nobility."

"But still the pole star leers down from the same place in the black vault, winking hedeously like ann insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey. Sometimes, when it is cloudy, I can sleep."

"It even seemed to him that a tear glistened in Olsufi Ivanovich's lustreless eyes; he raised his eyes and saw that a little tear seemed also to glisten on the eyelashes of Klara Olsufyevna, who was standing nearby; that in the eyes of Vladimir Semyonovich, too, something similar seemed to be taking place; that, finally, Andrei Filippovich's calm and inviolable dignifty was just as eloquent as the general tearful sympathy; that, finally, the youth who had at one time very much looked like an important councilor, taking advantage of the present moment, was now sobbing bitterly...Or all of this, perhaps, only seemed so to Mr. Golyadkin because he himself was weeping copiously."