“The whole of our scholarship - the whole of our thought - we question everything except the centrality of sexuality.”

“Maud laughed, drily. Roland said, "And then, really, what is it, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It's really powerlessness."Impotence," said Maud, leaning over, interested.I was avoiding that word, because that precisely isn't the point. We are so knowing. And all we've found out, is primitive sympathetic magic. Infantile polymorphous perversity. Everything relates to us and we're so imprisoned in ourselves - we can't see things.”

“We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech--but we say, the tree, the pool, / And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun, / Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now / Particularly our sun....”

“He hesitated. “They were what stayed alive, when I’d been taught and examined everything else.”Maud smiled then. “Exactly. That’s it. What could survive our education.”

“What is read and understood and contemplated and intellectually grasped is our own, madam, to live and work with. A lifetime's study will not make accessible to us more than a fragment of our own ancestral past, let alone the aeons before our race was formed. But that fragment we must thoroughly possess and hand on. Hoc opus, hic labor est. There is, I am tempted to assert, no easy way, no short cut: we are, in attempting those, like Bunyan's Ignorance who found a path to Hell at the very gate of the City of Heaven.”

“We are a species of animal which is bringing about the end of the world we were born into. Not out of evil or malice, or not mainly, but because of a lopsided mixture of extraordinary cleverness, extraordinary greed, extraordinary proliferation of our own kind, and a biologically built-in short-sightedness.”

“Outside our small safe place flies mystery.”