“Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on.”

“Now he reduced his progress to the rhythm of his boots -- he walked across the land until he came to the sea. Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on. In one pan of the scales, his wound, thirst, the blister, tiredness, the heat, the aching in his feet and legs, the Stukas, the distance, the Channel; in the other, I'll wait for you, and the memory of when she had said it, which he had come to treat like a sacred site. Also, the fear of capture. His most sensual memories -- their few minutes in the library, the kiss in Whitehall -- was bleached colorless through overuse. He knew by heart certain passages from her letters, he had revisited their tussle with the vase by the fountain, he remembered the warmth from her arm at the dinner when the twins went missing. These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.But these heresies died when he read her last letter. He touched his breast pocket. It was a kind of genuflection. Still there. Here was something new on the scales. That he could be cleared had all the simplicity of love. Merely tasting the possibility reminded him of how much had narrowed and died. His taste for life, no less, all the old ambitions and pleasures. The prospect was of rebirth, a triumphant return.”

“Here were the luxury and priviledge of the well-fed man scoffing at all hopes and progress for the rest. [He] owed nothing to a world that nurtured him kindly, liberally educated him for free, sent him to no wars, brought him to manhood without scary rituals or famine or fear of vengeful gods, embraced him with a handsome pension in his twenties and placed no limits on his freedom of expression. This was an easy nihilism that never doubted that all we had made was rotten, never thought to pose alternatives, never derived hope from friendship, love, free markets, industry, technology, trade, and all the arts and sciences.”

“When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience- if only he had had them both at once- would surely have seen them both through.”

“She lit up as she descended the stairs to the hall, knowing that she would not have dared had her father been at home. He had precise ideas about where a woman should be seen smoking: not in the street, or any public place, not on entering a room, not standing up, and only when offered, never from her own supply - notions as self evident to him as natural justice. Three years among the sophisticates of Girton had not provided her with courage to confront him.”

“She thought of Robbie at dinner when there had been something manic and glazed in his look. Might he be smoking the reefers she had read about in a magazine, these cigarettes that drove young men of bohemian inclination across the borders of insanity?”

“... he felt unusually warm toward humankind. He even thought that it could warm to him. Everyone, all of us, individually facing oblivion as a matter of course, and no one complaining much. As a species, not the best imaginable, but certainly the best, no, the most interesting there was.”