“If it is true that nature abhors a vacuum, then criminality regards it as a business opportunity.”

“He became merely the broken statue of a beast, now without another's fear to animate it.”

“I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all read...”

“When one encounters enough strangeness, then what is strange ultimately becomes familiar.The mind can accommodate itself to almost anything, given time: pain, grief, loss, even the possibility that...”

“Once upon a time for that is how all stories should begin there was a boy who lost his mother.”

“We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we may be immortal).”

“There are many things that make a man irritable when he arrives home from work in the evening and a sensible wife will usually notice the storm-signals and will leave him alone until he simmers down.”

“Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places.”

“A lot of men wouldn't like being called a romantic. It's not macho enough.'Quite often men are fools.”

“England and the English governing class never did call on this absurd deity of race until it seemed, for an instant, that they had no other god to call on the truth of the whole matter is very simp...”