Ned Beauman

“If I want to feel as if I'm being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.”

“She had so many freckles that Erskine wondered if she might have stolen some from other children.”

“You couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate at least something. Indeed, perhaps you couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate almost everything.”

“The Nazis, he had written in his latest, "are wedded to a sort of aesthetico-moral fallacy, which is that if a man has blond hair, blue eyes and strong features, then he will also be brave, loyal, intelligent and so on. They truly believe that goodness has some causal relationship with beauty. Which is idiotic, yes, but no more idiotic than you are, Egon. When you see a girl like Adele Hitler with an innocent, pretty face, can you honestly tell me you don't assume she must be an angelic person? Even though it makes about as much sense as astrology.”

“...a tall, gaunt man with small narrow eyes set deep in his skull like two old sisters trying to spy out of the windows of their house without being noticed themselves.”

“...a portrait of a muscular grey-haired man with a grim, almost demented gaze and the sort of moustache that could beat you in an arm-wrestling contest.”

“What does it do?" said Loeser. "You feel as if you're being sucked down this fathomless, gloomy tunnel. Or to put it another way, it's as if all the different weights and cares of the world have been lifted from your shoulders to he replaced by a single, much larger sort of consolidated weight. Your limbs stop working and you can't really talk. If you take enough then it can last for hours and hours, but it seems like even longer because time slows down." Hildkraut smiled wistfully. "It's fantastic." At their feet, somebody groaned softly as if in enthusiastic assent. "And it makes Wagner sound really good.”