“I recalled my father-in-law's aphorism "To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom..." & I pretended to extract a speck from my eye.”

“Linnaeus's last lesson, of which he himself was unaware, was that professorships kill philosophers. Oh, I'm vain enough to want my burgeoning Flora Japonica to be published one day--as a votive offering to human knowledge--but a seat at Uppsala, or Leiden, or Cambridge, holds no allure. My heart is the East's in this lifetime. This is my third year in Nagasaki, and I have work enough for another three, or six. During the court embassy I can see landscapes no European botanist ever saw. My seminarians are keen young men--with one young woman--and visiting scholars bring me specimens from all over the empire.”

“Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.”

“The silences after his last gasp were sung together by a blackbird. I lay there, my eyes unable to close. His were unable to open. I listed the places where I hurt, and how much. My loins felt ripped. Something inside had torn. There were seven places on my body where he had sunk his fangs into my skin and bitten. He'd dug his nails into my neck, and twisted my head to one side, and clawed my face. I hadn't made a noise. He had made all the noise for both of us. Had it hurt him?”

“Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue. "Oy!" yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. "There's a fackin' queue!"Never apologize, advises Lloyd George. Say it again, only this time, ruder. "I know there's a 'fackin' queue'! I already queued in it once and I am not going to queue in it again just because Nina Simone over there won't sell me a ruddy ticket!"A colored yeti in a clip-on uniform swooped. "Wassa bovver?""This old man here reckons his colostomy bag entitles him to jump the queue," said the skinhead, "and make racist slurs about the lady of Afro-Caribbean extraction in the advance-travel window."I couldn't believe I was hearing this.”

“Uncle Tarmac says vehicles always resemble their owners, and likes advising my female cousins to judge whether boyfriends will make decent husbands or not by observing how they treat or mistreat their cars.”

“The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me.”