“She liked things that had been written by people who had lived short, ugly, and tragic lives. Or, who at least, were English.”

“We'd lived our lives thinking that there was a special way of living for people who had been discarded.”

“...But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true - that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place...and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since.”

“All over the world, boys on every side of bomb line were laying down their lives for what they had been told was their country, and no one seemed to mind, least of all the boys who were laying down their young lives.”

“She tried not to be gloomy at funerals. People lived, and died, and were remembered. It happened in the same way that winter followed summer. It was not a wrong thing. There were tears of course, but they were for those who were left. Those who had gone on did not need them.”

“They were truly new people. No longer Forest People, certainly not the Horde. They were outcasts. They were the chosen. Those who had died. Those who lived.”