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Anna a simțit cum i se dezleagă baierele inimii, dar ce domina în această senzație — durerea, sau ușurarea — n-ar fi putut să spună.

Sunt aici, sunt aproape, părea că spune el, ai unde să te întorci, ai un refugiu unde nu trebuie să-ți fie frică să trăiești!

Ai măcar vreun vis? nu se lasă Nunik.

Pel-Anesant Armenus își dă parul la o parte de pe frunte și zâmbește gânditoare.

Un vis? Am. Aș vrea să nu se termine vara.

A început să se scuture de întâmplări și oameni asa cum își scutură un copac frunzele toamna.

Un cocoș a cântat zgomotos, țipătul lui a fost urmat de un altul, apoi de un al treilea. Pasărea ghicea întotdeauna fără greș când se linișteau lucrurile. Maro s-a ridicat și a descuiat ușa pivniței. Puteau să iasă — și să trăiască mai departe.

Așa au trecut mulți ani. Atanes la început a refuzat-o — nu voia să depindă de nimeni, dar apoi s-a obișnuit și chiar a îndrăgit-o. Odată, luându-si inima-n dinți, i-a propus să se căsătorească. Ea i-a răspuns că la un loc o să se adune atâta durere, că n-o să meargă. Așa, fiecare de unul singur, o să supraviețuiască cumva.

Oamenii aceștia mă fac să mă simt foarte umil. Au făcut multe lucruri care ne ajută să ștergem din memorie amintirea amară a oamenilor care și-au pierdut orice urmă de omenie.

Am învățat pe pielea noastră o lecție în Siberia: să nu stai în vânt, pentru că vântul este adevăratul ucigaș. Bătrânul ostiak îmi spusese: “Zăpadă? Cine-si face griji din cauza zăpezii? Strânge-o in jurul tău și ai să dormi mai bine decât pe o saltea de puf.”

După un timp petrecut aici, și sub conducerea tovarășului Stalin, vom face din voi cetățeni folositori. Cine nu muncește nu mănâncă. […]
Nu va fi doar muncă. Puteți participa la cursuri pentru a vă corecta modul de gândire. Avem o bibliotecă excelentă, pe care o puteți folosi după orele de muncă. Vreo întrebare?

Când vine primăvara aici?

Nu pune întrebări stupide, răspunse Politrucul.

Where are you going? asked his friend

I'm going to have another look at that portrait of the Chamberlain,the Arnhold who betrayed his brethren,answered the priest.I wonder what part—I wonder if a man is less a traitor when he is twice a traitor?

& he ruminated long before the portrait of a white-haired man with black eyebrows & a pink,painted sort of smile that seemed to contradict the black warning in his eyes

My friend, I want to tell you and all your modern world a secret. You will never get to the good in people till you have been through the bad in them.

I know it was a strange crime,assented Brown. The little sins are sometimes harder to confess than the big ones—but that's why it's so important to confess them.Your crime is committed by every fashionable hostess six times a week:& yet you find it sticks to your tongue like a nameless atrocity.

It makes one feel such a damned fool.

I know,but one often has to choose between feeling a damned fool and being one.

And where are you going next?

Birmingham, answered the actor, puffing a cigarette. Didn't I tell you I was a Futurist? I really do believe in those things if I believe in anything. Change, bustle and new things every morning. I am going to Manchester,Liverpool,Leeds,Hull,Huddersfield,Glasgow,Chicago—in short, to enlightened, energetic, civilized society!

In short,said Muscari, to the real Paradise of Thieves.

Yet he was neither a charlatan nor a child;but a hot,logical Latin who liked a certain thing and was it.His poetry was as straightforward as anyone else's prose.He desired fame or wine or the beauty of women with a torrid directness inconceivable among the cloudy ideals or cloudy compromises of the north;to vaguer races his intensity smelt of danger or even crime.Like fire or the sea,he was too simple to be trusted

His political and social speeches were cataracts of anecdotes and "loud laughter"; his bodily health was of a bursting sort; his ethics were all optimism; and he dealt with the Drink problem (his favourite topic) with that immortal or even monotonous gaiety which is so often a mark of the prosperous total abstainer.

But I knew Kalon was the criminal before I came into the front door. I'm quite serious, I tell you I knew he had done it, even before I knew what he had done.

But why?

These pagan stoics, said Brown reflectively, always fail by their strength. There came a crash and a scream down the street, and the priest of Apollo did not start or look round. I did not know what it was. But I knew that he was expecting it.

Oh, if these new pagans would only be old pagans, they would be a little wiser! The old pagans knew that mere naked Nature-worship must have a cruel side. They knew that the eye of Apollo can blast and blind.

Wilfred Bohun threw one leg over the parapet, and Father Brown had him in a minute by the collar.

"Not by that door," he said quite gently; "that door leads to hell."

Bohun staggered back against the wall, and stared at him with frightful eyes.
"How do you know all this?" he cried. "Are you a devil?”

“Flambeau, there is a long seat there under the veranda, where we can smoke out of the rain. You are my only friend in the world, and I want to talk to you. Or, perhaps, be silent with you."

They established themselves comfortably in the veranda seat; Father Brown, against his common habit, accepted a good cigar and smoked it steadily in silence, while the rain shrieked and rattled on the roof of the veranda.”

“My father," said Flambeau in French, "what is the matter with you?"

Father Brown was silent and motionless for half a minute, then he said: "Superstition is irreligious, but there is something in the air of this place. I think it's that Indian—at least, partly.”

“That woman's over-driven," said Father Brown; "that's the kind of woman that does her duty for twenty years, and then does something dreadful."

The little doctor looked at him for the first time with an eye of interest. "Did you ever study medicine?" he asked.

"You have to know something of the mind as well as the body," answered the priest; "we have to know something of the body as well as the mind."

“What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?"

"A saint," said Father Brown.

"I think," said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, "that Ruby means a Socialist."

"A radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes," remarked Crook, with some impatience; "and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam. Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man who desires….”

my last crime was a Christmas crime,a cheery,cosy,English middle-class crime;a crime of Charles Dickens. I did it in a good old middle-class house near Putney,a house with a crescent of carriage drive,a house with a stable by the side of it,a house with the name on the two outer gates,a house with a monkey tree. Enough, you know the species. I really think my imitation of Dickens's style was dexterous and literary.

in that instant he had lost his head. His head was always most valuable when he had lost it. In such moments he put two and two together and made four million. Often the Catholic Church (which is wedded to common sense) did not approve of it. Often he did not approve of it himself. But it was real inspiration—important at rare crises—when whosoever shall lose his head the same shall save it.

Father Brown had the kind of head that cannot help asking questions; and on this apparently trivial question his head almost split. He had seen men run in order to jump. He had seen men run in order to slide. But why on earth should a man run in order to walk? Or, again, why should he walk in order to run? Yet no other description would cover the antics of this invisible pair of legs.

“Stop, stop, stop!" he cried; "stop talking a minute, for I see half. Will God give me strength? Will my brain make the one jump and see all? Heaven help me! I used to be fairly good at thinking. I could paraphrase any page in Aquinas once. Will my head split—or will it see? I see half—I only see half."

He buried his head in his hands, and stood in a sort of rigid torture of thought or prayer…

Sir Arthur St. Clare, as I have already said, was a man who read his Bible. That was what was the matter with him. When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else's Bible? A printer reads a Bible for misprints. A Mormon reads his Bible, and finds polygamy; a Christian Scientist reads his, and finds we have no arms and legs.

“And that popular story is untrue?" suggested Flambeau.

"No," said his friend quietly, "that story is quite true, so far as it goes."

"Well, I think it goes far enough!" said Flambeau; "but if the popular story is true, what is the mystery?"

The little priest bit his finger reflectively and said: "Why, the mystery is a mystery of psychology. Or, rather, it is a mystery of two psychologies.”

Father, said Flambeau suddenly, do you think it was all a dream?

The priest shook his head, whether in dissent or agnosticism, but remained mute. A smell of hawthorn and of orchards came to them through the darkness, telling them that a wind was awake; the next moment it swayed their little boat and swelled their sail, and carried them onward down the winding river to happier places and the homes of harmless men.

“Do you believe in doom?" asked the restless Prince Saradine suddenly.

"No," answered his guest. "I believe in Doomsday."

The prince turned from the window and stared at him in a singular manner, his face in shadow against the sunset. "What do you mean?" he asked.”