“Sometimes there is a thin line separating orthodox zeal from apostasy,' said Father Lenar Hoyt”

“Father Lenar Hoyt stepped away from the wall where he had been leaning, raised his right hand with thumb and little finger touching, three fingers raised, the gesture somehow including himself as well as those before him, and said softly, 'Ego te absolvo.”

“The day before the Queen's Ball, Father had a visitor--a very young girl with literary aspirations, someone Lord Lytton had recommended visit Father and sent over–and while Father was explaining to her the enjoyment he was having in writing this Drood book for serialisation, this upstart of a girl had the temerity to ask, 'But suppose you died before all the book was written?' [...] He spoke very softly in his kindest voice and said to her, 'One can only work on, you know--work while it is day.”

“Francis Crozier now understood that the most desirable and erotic thing a woman could wear were the many modest layers such as Sophia Cracroft wore to dinner in the governor's house, enough silken fabric to conceal the lines of her body, allowing a man to concentrate on the exciting loveliness of her wit”

“There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.”

“This is some sort of joke, isn't it?" asks Hunt, staring at the flawless blue sky and distant fields.I cough as lightly and briefly as possible into a handkerchief I have made from a towel borrowed from the inn. "Probably," I say. "But then, what isn't?”

“Want to talk about Shakespeare's sonnets?" asked Orphu of Io.Are you shitting me?" The moravecs loved the ancient human colloquial phrases, the more scatological the better.Yes," said Orphu. "I am most definitely shitting you, my friend.”