“I shall introduce this city and its occupants as a series of objects whose relationship cannot be told with any certainty. Though violence may connect them, though pity, compassion, hope may marry one thing to another, still all that is in process cannot be judged, and that which has passed has gone beyond judgment, which leaves us again, with lives and belongings, places, shuttling here and there, hapless, benighted, discordant.”

“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.”

“That would be the death of anyone - to recognize false hopes with a certainty. One mustn't know that. If it is offered, refuse!”

“Mr. Gibbons had the talent that many puppeteers have of speaking to children as though he believed they were intelligent and could understand a thing or two.”

“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.”

“Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you?”