“Blunt nodded slowly, like an old man. It was not clear whether he had understood and was agreeing, or whether he had given up the attempt to understand and was merely being agreeable.”

“Every man has a vision,’ Nur Hussain said. ‘Whether he understands it or not.”

“It is quite clear that between love and understanding there is a very close link… He who loves understands, and he who understands loves. One who feels understood feels loved, and one who feels loved feels sure of being understood.”

“He was pretty. His eyes were kind and young. One had to wonder whether he was fourteen years old, or a thousand, being so smooth and untouched. A little boy peered out of the man's face. He was funny… I was bewildered… a man, responsible for the life and death of thousands, and yet there was no trace on him? One could be frightened of less, and yet so harmlessly innocent? Yes, innocent was the word… I knew I would remember this meeting the rest of my life, because I had never before met an emptyness like this.”

“Like most Englishmen, he felt something strongly, and proceeded to muddle around until he had, somehow or other, cleared up the mess.”

“The end of man is knowledge but there's one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it would save him.”

“Of this she was perfectly unaware; to her he was only the man who had made himself agreeable nowhere, and who had not thought her handsome enough to dance with.”

“When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep”

“Already in his old age, at seventy-five years old, after being seriously hospitalized for a severe heart attack, Javier Pérez would remember that only once in his entire existence had he believed he understood what life was.”

“This was Barrington Erle, a politician of long standing, who was still looked upon by many as a young man, because he had always been known as a young man, and because he had never done anything to compromise his position in that respect. He had not married, or settled himself down in a house of his own, or become subject to the gout, or given up being careful about the fitting of his clothes.”