“I had learned by personal experience that grumblers are deaf to any voices but their own.”

“I have no fear of the dead. Indeed in my own limited experience I have found them to produce in me a feeling that is quite the opposite of fear. A dead body is much more fascinating than a live one and I have learned that most corpses tell better stories. I’d had the good fortune of seeing several of them in my time.”

“I had once repeated the experiment to reassure myself that this was so, and it was. Ashes to ashes; starch to sugar. A little window into the Creation”

“Even in complete silence, Buckshaw had its own unique silence; a silence I would recognize anywhere. ”

“I remembered that Johnson had declared portrait painting to be an improper employment for a woman. “Public practice of any art and staring in men’s faces is very indelicate in a female,” he had said. Well I’d seen Dr. Johnson’s face in the book’s frontispiece and I couldn’t imagine anyone male or female wanting to stare into it for any length of time —the man was an absolute toad.”

“I had to make water ” I said. It was the classic female excuse and no male in recorded history had ever questioned it. “I see ” the Inspector said and left it at that. Later I would have a quick piddle behind the caravan for insurance purposes. No one would be any the wiser.”

“Perhaps, I thought, whenever we began to breathe the breath of others, when the spinning atoms of their bodies began to mingle withour own, we took on something of their personality, like crystals in a snowflake. Perhaps we became something more, yet something lesser than ourselves.”