“The love they felt wasn’t, of course, what it once had been;
the attraction between them had gradually diminished,
the attraction had diminished a great deal.
But to be separated, that wasn’t what they themselves wanted.”

“This was what I’d asked her to give me. I had no right to complain just because it wasn’t what I wanted to hear.”

“This thing between them, this bond—it wasn’t just passion,
and it wasn’t wicked.
It was love, and it was divine.”

“One world and then another, running like a chain. One world treading on the heels of another world that plodded just ahead. One world’s tomorrow, another world’s today. And yesterday is tomorrow, and tomorrow is the past.
Except, there wasn’t any past. No past, that was, except the figment of remembrance that flitted like a night-winged thing in the shadow of one’s mind. No past that one could reach. No pictures painted on the wall of time. No film that one could run backwards and see what-once-had-been…
One road was open, but another road was closed. Not closed, of course, for it had never been. For there wasn’t any past, there never had been any, there wasn’t room for one. Where there should have been a past there was another world.”

“The guy had literally been through hell and back. Even when he wasn’t trying, he made the toilets explode. What would Percy be like if he wanted to act scary?”

“The trouble with most Englishwomen is that they will dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous incarnation… they do not want to attract attention.”

“What had always attracted me in the opposite sex was what they tried to hide, what provoked all the metaphorical equivalents of seducing them out of their clothes into nakedness.”

“A great British prime minister once remarked that the people were divided into two nations, the rich and the poor, and in effect that these had no knowledge of each other. One might say the same, perhaps, of those who live in parts of the world where segregation by races is practised. But these barriers, or the reasons for them, belong to a part of our history which is fortunately passing away. There is one barrier, however, which no amount of progress or tolerance or legislation can ever diminish. I'm talking about the barrier between the attractive and the unattractive.”

“Everything has something to undermine it, and every blessing has something to diminish it. The thing that undermines this religion and diminishes this blessing is those who criticize a great deal and those who stab in the back; they show you what you want to see and they conceal that which you dislike. They are wicked like ostiches.”

“We never attract what we want, we always attract what we are.”