'These touching lines...'

 I have never seriously kept a commonplace book, but I have long had a habit of jotting down, usually in scrappy little notebooks, short quotations from things I'm reading or have come across. I lost several such notebooks some years ago when my bag mysteriously disappeared in the course of a Tube journey (presumably nicked), but I did start another one – and yesterday, while looking for something else altogether, I came across it in a pocket of my current bag, and spent a while browsing in its dog-eared pages.
  The first entry is this, written by an early reader of the anonymously published In Memoriam: 'These touching lines evidently come from the full heart of the widow of a military man.' The last is a quotation from Michael Oakeshott (one of several): 'All great works of art have a touch of lightness, happiness, almost inconsequence, and this saves us from being oppressed, and having to turn away from them.' There's even a quotation from Nietzsche along similar lines: 'What is good is light. Everything divine runs on delicate feet.' Near these are a couple of God quotations: 'Believe in God, and don't put anything past Him' (Peter de Vries, The Blood of the Lamb) and 'The bastard! He doesn't exist!' (Samuel Beckett: Endgame). Beckett turns up several times: I particularly like 'Ah yes, I was always subject to the deep thought, especially in the spring of the year' (Malone Dies), and – this in response to the question 'What's the matter with you?' – 'I tried to look like one with whom that only is the matter which is native to him' (The Calmative). Don't we all? 
   Here is Oscar Wilde on Max Beerbohm: 'God has conferred on him the priceless gift of perpetual middle age.' And James Russell Lowell on Keats: 'The moral seems to have so perfectly interfused the physical man, that you might almost say he could feel sorrow with his hands.' And Ivy Compton-Burnett on Trollope: 'Yes, he is good. He is so good one wonders why he isn't better.' And Guy Davenport on Kafka: 'Like Kierkegaard, he saw the absurdity of life as the most meaningful clue to its elusive vitality. His humour authenticates his seriousness: "Only Maimonides may say there is no God; he's entitled"' – there's God again. I think that's enough for now.