“Quite often a man goes on for years imagining that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him.”

“For as is often the happenstance with that which is precious and lost, when you find him again, he may well not be quite as you left him.”

“She hated that she was still so desperate for a glimpse of him, but it had been this way for years.”

“Swami Apasthanand is still there, he is very old now, but I had gone to see him and stayed with him for quite some time. But it is a different world, why get into it here.”

“Always the same picture, the narrow waters of Carrick Roads in Falmouth, the murky hump of Pendennis Castle lying across the starboard bow of the ship flying an admiral's flag: his flag — the knowledge of that had been quite definite, as it so often was in dreams. The squadron had been all around him, ready to weigh, or still shortening their cables. About to leave Falmouth, as he had done so many times.”

“I couldn't fault her for believing, because I had to imagine i was nice to have that illusion still intact.”

“He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it”

“If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life.”

“She'd secretly had a crush on him since they were twelve years old. Last summer, she'd fallen for him hard.”

“For a hundred and fifty years the Virgin and Queens ruled French taste and thought so successfully that the French man has never yet quite decided whether to be more proud or ashamed of it. Life has ever since seemed a little flat to him, and art a little cheap. He saw that the woman, in elevating herself, had made him appear ridiculous, and he tried to retaliate with a wit not always sparkling, and too often at his own expense.”