“First, he says, you have to go out into the world. This is not a simple matter of going outside one's door. No, that is simply going out. That's what one does when one is on the way to the store to buy a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine. When one goes out into the world, one is shedding preconceptions of past paths and ideas of past paths, and trying to move freely through an unsubstantiated and new geography.”

“One cultivates one's life, one's friends, one's means, one's hopes. One goes from place to place, from triumph to triumph, in search of ambition and ambition's remedy as though in flight across some imagined map, the subject of a conversation in a comfortable English room.”

“If he acts, if he doesn't, it's meaningless. The whole thing goes forward. No one is important. No one at all.”

“The old man took out an extraordinarily beautiful and elegant handkerchief and gave it to her to dry her tears. It was the sort of handkerchief that one might be content to be judged by if it was all that remained of one after one's death.”

“You live your life, you try to live compassionately, and that's the end of it. You do a little more than you should have to in order to be a good person, but you don't go making big changes in the world, trying to fix things. It presumes too much to do so. There's only this: if everyone acts quietly, compassionately, things will go a little better than they would have otherwise. But people will still suffer.”

“In the next room, perhaps twenty people were sitting around, drinking what looked like wine out of wine-glasses. They were the sort of people William and Louisa used to be in the habit of knowing, a crowd of elegant furniture, like the legs of a herd of gazelle taken together, and equally useless, when all things are considered.”

“The old man began to sing. His voice was very lovely and obviously a part of something that the world had disposed of in its haste, evidence of a grander, kinder past.”