“He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass: environment is but his looking glass.”

“All things that pass Are wisdom's looking-glass.”

“Unk was at war with his environment. He had come to regard his environment as being either malevolent or cruelly mismanaged. His response was to fight it with the only weapons at hand- passive resistance and open displays of contempt.”

“Look at my glasses. I can't even see that there are any stars in the sky without them, but it's not the glasses that are doing the seeing, it's me, Madeleine. I don't think Father's eyes are seeing now, but he is. And maybe his brain isn't thinking, but a brain's just something to think through, the way my glasses are something to see through.”

“I should think he must be rather a dressy man for his time of life. Such a number of looking-glasses! Oh Lord! There is not getting away from one's self”

“...he seems to be on the brink of one of his bad spells again, one of the fits of lugubrious self-pity that turn into black gloom. He likes to think that they comes from elsewhere, episodes of bad weather that cross the sky and pass on. He prefers not to think they come from inside him and are his, part of him.”