Below us the Thames grew lighter, and all around below were the shadows - the dark shadows of buildings and bridges that formed the base of this dreadful masterpiece.

The men are walking. They are fifty feet apart, for dispersal. Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion.

About every two minutes a new wave of planes would be over. The motors seemed to grind rather than roar, and to have an angry pulsation like a bee buzzing in blind fury.

Our artillery has really been sensational. For once we have enough of something and at the right time. Officers tell me they actually have more guns than they know what to do with.

The American soldier is quick in adapting himself to a new mode of living. Outfits which have been here only three days have dug vast networks of ditches three feet deep in the bare brown earth. They have rigged up a light here and there with a storage battery.

All the rest of us - you and me and even the thousands of soldiers behind the lines in Africa - we want terribly yet only academically for the war to get over.

In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory - there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else.

It was a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire.

At last we are in it up to our necks, and everything is changed, even your outlook on life.

The front-line soldier wants it to be got over by the physical process of his destroying enough Germans to end it. He is truly at war. The rest of us, no matter how hard we work, are not.

The closest fires were near enough for us to hear the crackling flames and the yells of firemen. Little fires grew into big ones even as we watched. Big ones died down under the firemen's valor only to break out again later.

But to the fighting soldier that phase of the war is behind. It was left behind after his first battle. His blood is up. He is fighting for his life, and killing now for him is as much a profession as writing is for me.

I've really been sick with this cold, but I think I might have kept the columns going anyhow except I was just so low in spirit, I didn't have the will to struggle against them when my deadline was so close and I felt so lousy.

If I can just see the European war out I think I might feel justified in quitting the war.

I was away from the front lines for a while this spring, living with other troops, and considerable fighting took place while I was gone. When I got ready to return to my old friends at the front I wondered if I would sense any change in them.

I've been immersed in it too long. My spirit is wobbly and my mind is confused. The hurt has become too great.

Below us the Thames grew lighter, and all around below were the shadows - the dark shadows of buildings and bridges that formed the base of this dreadful masterpiece.

Swinging first and swinging to kill is all that matters now.

War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.

Someday when peace has returned to this odd world I want to come to London again and stand on a certain balcony on a moonlit night and look down upon the peaceful silver curve of the Thames with its dark bridges.

If you go long enough without a bath, even the fleas will leave you alone.

If you go long enough without a bath even the fleas will leave you alone.

There are infinite shadings of light and shadows and colors... it's an extraordinarily subtle language. Figuring out how to speak that language is a lifetime job.

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living.

How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.

Twice I had been stopped by these jobs, and I thought the role on Dark Shadows would go on for about three or four weeks. And then, the phenomenon began, the role caught on, the mail started to flood in.

There's something about shadows because you make your own mind up about what's lurking in them.

My cameraman and I devised a method, which we started using from my second film, which applies mainly to day scenes shot in the studio, where we used bounced light instead of direct light. We agreed with this thing of four or five shadows following the actors is dreadful.

One is forever throwing away substance for shadows.

Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.

Afflictions are but the shadows of God's wings.

Human rights are not a privilege granted by the few, they are a liberty entitled to all, and human rights, by definition, include the rights of all humans, those in the dawn of life, the dusk of life, or the shadows of life.

In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.

Our acts our angels are, for good or ill, our fatal shadows that walk by us still.

It was still quite light out of doors, but inside with the curtains drawn and the smouldering fire sending out a dim, uncertain glow, the room was full of deep shadows.

I'm always shy in front of an audience, so I'm always at the back, in the shadows, just doing it. I don't like the front, the adulation.

Ceremony leads her bigots forth, prepared to fight for shadows of no worth. While truths, on which eternal things depend, can hardly find a single friend.

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.

Manners are like the shadows of virtues, they are the momentary display of those qualities which our fellow creatures love and respect.

I'll often rush out from Dark Shadows, having made a 5.30PM appointment, working for a couple of hours.

Hell, covering all with its gloomy vapors, has cast shadows on even the holiest eyes.

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!

To think of shadows is a serious thing.

If coming events are said to cast their shadows before, past events cannot fall to leave their impress behind them.

There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.

Suffering has roused them from the sleep of gentle life, and every day fills them with a terrible intoxication. They are now something more than themselves; those we loved were merely happy shadows.

They say that shadows of deceased ghosts Do haunt the houses and the graves about, Of such whose life's lamp went untimely out, Delighting still in their forsaken hosts.

So that godly sorrow may be discerned by this train of graces wherewith it is accompanied, that worldly sorrow wants, at least in the truth of them, though it may have some shadows of them.

My early influences were the Shadows, who were an English instrumental band. They basically got me into playing and later on I got into blues and jazz players. I liked Clapton when he was with John Mayall. I really liked that period.