“It's an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don't want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it. If they were merely indifferent it would be natural and understandable. But it is much stronger than that, much more positive. They are annoyed.Very odd, isn't it.”

“One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn't, of course. It's a small niggling thing.”

“If you think about the unthinkable long enough it becomes quite reasonable.”

“The trouble with you, dear, is that you think an angel of the Lord as a creature with wings, whereas he is probably a scruffy little man with a bowler hat.”

“The truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper, the sale of a house, the price of a ring.”

“Ruth puts in all the tiddley bits and the expression and doesn’t mind how many wrong notes she strikes, but with Jane it is accuracy or nothing. I don’t know which Chopin would have hated more,” Eleanor said, folding bread and butter into a thickness that would match her appetite.”

“Alan Grant: "There are... far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It's a horrible thought." The Midget (his nurse): "You sound constipated.”