“He walked, looking about him angrily and distractedly. All his ideas now seemed to be circling round some single point, and he felt that there really was such a point, and that now, now, he was left facing that point—and for the first time, indeed, during the last two months.”

“For the first time in a long time, I actually look at her. I've always thought Lena was pretty, but now it occurs to me that at some point - last summer? last year? - she became beautiful.”

“She had never really believed in God. There didn't seem any point in it, and he just seemed so, well, unlikely. But now, a world that definitely had no God at all felt kind of... empty. It wasn't really God she wanted; it was the possibility of God.”

“There was no point in looking again. He [Cork] knew that. No point except to feed the coldness inside him. In a strange way, that was exactly what he wanted now. He wanted to feed himself to the cold until the cold had consumed him and he didn't care anymore.”

“His sixth year, it seemed to him, had lasted a remarkably long time and there were points at which he frankly wondered whether he would ever turn seven. But now it was the night before his birthday, and barring some cosmic disaster, the advent of some unexpected black hole into which the earth might be sucked, with the attendant reversal or suspension of time, in very few hours he would be waking up to a world in which he was numbered among the seven-year-olds.”

“Mankind is not a circle with a single centre but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.”