“We'd be the safest country in the world if the world knew we didn't have a gun. Men are not killed because they get mad at each other. They're killed because one has a gun.”

“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake”

“The greatest threat to peace is the barrage of rightist propaganda portraying war as decent, honorable, and patriotic.”

“You wouldn't think you could kill an ocean, would you? But we'll do it one day. That's how negligent we are.”

“When people kill themselves, they think they're ending the pain, but all they're doing is passing it on to those they leave behind.”

“I think people are often quite unaware of their inner selves, their other selves, their imaginative selves, the selves that aren’t on show in the world. It’s something you grow out of from childhood onwards, losing possession of yourself, really. I think literature is one of the best ways back into that. You are hypnotized as soon as you get into a book that particularly works for you, whether it’s fiction or a poem. You find that your defenses drop, and as soon as that happens, an imaginative reality can take over because you are no longer censoring your own perceptions, your own awareness of the world.”

“...even though I was getting better education at home than any of the kids in Toyah, I'd need to go to finishing school when I was thirteen, both to acquire social graces and to earn a diploma. Because in this world, Dad said, it's not enough to have a fine education. You need a piece of paper to prove you go it.”