“A marriage takes work. You have to constantly put energy into it to keep it from falling apart. Going nowhere takes energy. Stability isn't what you get when you do nothing. It's what you can hope ...”

“Keeping things stable takes energy. I guess it's a little counter-intuitive, since you think of Newton's first law: a body at rest will stay at rest. But the reality is different. Think about an ol...”

“Don't cry over someone who wouldn't cry over you.”

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: youre falling to the floor crying ...”

“Weeping is not the same thing as crying. It takes your whole body to weep, and when it's over, you feel like you don't have any bones left to hold you up.”

“One thing seems certain. Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its lifea springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own ...”

“When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will ...”

“You are exporting disorder [in the form of heat into the Universe] now as you read this book. You are hastening the demise of everything that exists, bringing forward by your very existence the arr...”

“If you want romance, fuck a journalist.”

“That's the thing with keeping up appearances, Rose; people will do anything to get one and anything to keep one.”

“I had never seen the end of day and the beginning of the night greet each other. We were caught in the loveliness between the two. A House Like a Lotus”