“If you’re insinuating that my personal hygiene is not up to the same high standard as yours you can go suck my galoshes.”

“I wanted to cry.I also wanted to go to my laboratory and prepare an enormous batch of nitrogen triiodide with which to blow up, in a spectacular mushroom cloud of purple vapor, the world and everyone in it.”

“Still, one of my Rules of Life is this: When you want something, bite your tongue.”

“Thinking and prayer are much the same thing anyway, when you stop to think about it -- if that makes any sense. Prayer goes up and thought comes down -- or so it seems. As far as I can tell, that's the only difference.”

“I brought to mind the image of the stranger lying there in the first light of dawn: the slight growth of whiskers on his chin, strands of his red hair shifting gently on the faint stirrings of the morning breeze, the pallor, the extended legs, the quivering fingers, that last, sucking breath. And that word, blown into my face ... "Vale."The thrill of it all!Yes," I said, "it was devastating.”

“You must have loved her awfully," I said, realizing even as I spoke that I made it sound as if Fenella were already dead. "Yes, sometimes very much," Porcelain said reflectively, "-and sometimes not at all." She must have seen my startled reaction. "Love's not some big river that flows on and on forever, and if you believe it is, you're a bloody fool. It can be dammed up until nothing's left but a trickle..." "Or stopped completely, I added.”

“I lay for a long time in silence, staring at the ceiling. Was my life always to be like this? I wondered. Was it going to go, forever, in an instant, from sunshine to shadow? From pandemonium to loneliness? From fierce anger to a fiercer kind of love?”