“Proposition one: time is a man, space is a woman.”

“Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.”

“It is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague.”

“I was the only man alive who knew time had begun again.”

“Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!”

“...in their millenial and long-lived patience they knew quite well how, in a hundred years, or a thousand years' time, or else, perhaps, tomorrow, in an hour's time, for it was all a gamble, a million to one chance, but all the same there was a chance that if they kept on shaking their chains, one day, some day, the clasps upon the shackles would part.”

“Abandoned lovers were often lured into the false embrace of faithless mistresses and this caused the Minister the gravest concern for he feared that one day a man would impregnate an illusion and then a generation of half-breed ghosts would befoul the city”