“Wasn’t ‘Ms.’ an honorific for females back in pre-rubicon days?” asked Frome. “Some sort of honorary degree for not getting married or something?”

“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?”

“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.”

“Do you think it's ready?" I [Silenus, The Poet] asked. "It's perfect... a masterpiece.""Do you think it'll sell?" I asked. "No fucking way.”

“Finding a woman like that amidst the herd of half-feeling, half-caring, half-responding, females in our society of 1860's England was not so much like finding a diamond in the rough as it was finding a warm responsive body amidst the cold dead forms on slabs in the Paris morgue that Dickens had so enjoyed taking me to.”

“The day is perfect and I hate it for being so.”

“There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one's sense of what is real.”