“Pompeii has nothing to teach us,we know crack of volcanic fissure,slow flow of terrible lava,pressure on heart, lungs, the brainabout to burst its brittle case(what the skull can endure!)”

“run run run Hermione. You have in your hands a message and a token...run and run and run and run Hermione. You know running and running and running that the messenger will take (lampadephoros) your message in its fervour and you will sink down exhausted...run,run, Hermione. For the message-bearer next in line has turned against you...dead, dead or forgotten. Hecate at crossroads, a destruction...”

“let us not teach / what we have learned badly / and not profited by”

“Nothing held her, she was nothing holding to this thing: I am Hermione Gart, a failure.”

“The thing she realised in that moment, that fraction of waiting, was lost. Nothing could bring the thing back, no words could make the thing solid and visible and therefore to be coped with. Solid and visible form was what she had been seeking. I will put this into visible language.”

“She knew herself the heart of a king buried in a sepulchre (in the land of his love) while the body of the king is elsewhere. My heart lies buried in there like Coeur de Lion (or whoever it was) who had his heart buried at Havre (or wherever it was) and the rest of him buried somewhere else.”

“We are voyagers, discoverersof the not-known,the unrecorded;we have no map;possibly we will reach haven,heaven.”