“And just as he said of me, the thing that his heart desired was not the thing that he professed to want.”

“In the middle of all the world's incessant noise, her message was music, and music was a thing that I'd mostly lived my life without. In the ten years since I'd last seen Miranda she'd come to some...”

“In fact, although I am not aware of it (and I am never aware of it, no matter how many times I have the dream) her suicide is a foregone conclusion. It is this way in dreams: when decisions are bei...”

“Be the time he finds his way out of the chamber and the planetarium, he has become me.”

“Like most modern people, we no longer bothered to make the distinction between events in real life and the dramas of fictional worlds, and so the cliff-hanger that inevitably, reliably ended the ho...”

“Think of it. Going to sleep and waking up later in a science fiction future. It'll be fantastic. The shock and the wonder of it.”

“The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great...”

“What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. ... In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cove...”

“What we get when we turn pro is we find our power. We find our will and our voice and we find our self-respect. We become who we always were but had, until then, been afraid to embrace and live out.”

“And just as he said of me, the thing that his heart desired was not the thing that he professed to want.”

“This is the last moment of contentment untainted by sorrow, when the brain hesitates before delivering the message to the heart that it knows it must.”

“In the middle of all the world's incessant noise, her message was music, and music was a thing that I'd mostly lived my life without. In the ten years since I'd last seen Miranda she'd come to some...”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”