“I'm a Buddhist. You might have a Christian obligation to catch pneumonia while you sit for two and a half hours listening to some twerp in a dress drone on about the virtue of wedded life but, dear...”

“Six saw a caterpillar.''What kind?''Green, with purple and white zigzags.''I see,' Thaniel said slowly. Liking children did not keep him from being perplexed by them. He was recently too old to rem...”

“What's that?' Thaniel said, curious. The postmarks and stamps weren't English or Japanese.'A painting. There's a depressed Dutchman who does countryside scenes and flowers and things. It's ugly, bu...”

“Mori made an unwilling sound. 'I don't like Western art.''No look at this.' He lifted it from its package. It wasn't heavy. 'It's clever, it looks like busy Mozart.''What?''I . . .' Thaniel sighed....”

“The creeping sense that he might have seen him reading the book came up from the ground, but that was more anxiety than evidence.”

“Everybody, professors and students and Proctors the same, knew that if the sign said 'do not walk on the grass', one hopped. Anybody who didn't had failed to understand what Oxford was.”

“After that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used ...”

“He realized that when he had been afraid to change he had been holding on to the illusion of Old Cheese that was no longer there”

“Where to start?Everything cracks and shakes,The air trembles with similes,No one world's better than another;the earth moans with metaphors.”