“We let off a Dungbomb in the corridor and it upset him for some reason—" "So he hauled us off to his office and started threatening us with the usual—" "—detention—" "—disembowelment—”

“He introduced himself to us out of kindness: how else could we have known him? Reason took us as far as the door; but it was his presence that let us in.”

“Usually, if we hate, it is the shadow of the person that we hate, rather than the substance. We may hate a person because he reminds us of someone we feared and disliked when younger; or because we see in him some gross caricature of what we find repugnant in ourself; or because he symbolizes an attitude that seems to threaten us.”

“There are so many of us now that we threaten to devour the world with our touching, starting with the things we adore most. At the same time, we obviously yearn for contact, and I fear what would happen if we were cut off from a distinctive, on-the-ground relationship with the past.”

“My guess is that he remembers some of me, some of us together, and the rest rolled off him like topsoil in a flash flood.”

“No sooner do we come into this world, than bits of us start to fall off.”