“In wartime people took action because of what they believed in. In peacetime people were driven by their private concerns.”

“Hes more a shape in a drape than a hep cat”

“Lately Mirabelle had reflected wistfully if people even noticed her a smartly dressed woman who came and went along the Promenade, always alone.”

“Wellsted will remember this moment for the rest of his life. It is the first time he desires something for himself that is not dedicated to his own advancement. It is the moment he falls in love.”

“She was herself in their company but a very specific version of herself.”

“It took a certain kind of person to come from luxury and seek out danger.”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”

“Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and...”

“The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.”

“An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of the night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in a success...”