“There were always too many hours in the day and never enough in the night.”

“There was no moon, no stars, but even the darkest of nights steals light from somewhere.”

“And he has tried to swim that stream,And he swam on both strong and steady,But the river was wide and strength did fail,And never more he'll see his Annie.And woe betide the willow wan,And woe betide the bush and briar,For they broke beneath her true love's hand,When strength did fail and limbs did tire.”

“The realization had brought with it a sudden stark insight into another kind of glamour. It was quite a long time ago now, but he saw it quite clearly: how the media and the advertisers had created their own kind of glamour to seduce whole populations into a kind of insanity. Food that was bad for people, drink that turned them into mindless thugs, countless tons of useless rubbish, all dressed up by advertising glamour to appear like things people couldn't live without. And the human race had fallen for it hook, line, and sinker, becoming....[c]onsumers of limitless glamour, all of it ultimately worthless.”

“It was essential that someone, somewhere, even if it was only the fairy folk, should know that the human race had produced more than wars, catastrophes, and ultimately its own slow and painful self-destruction. It had produced things of exquisite and lasting beauty as well.”

“I died last night. Seventy years too young.”

“Dad always said that he had enough trouble sorting the fiction out of so-called facts, without reading fiction. He always said that science was already too muddled without trying to make it jibe with religion. He said those things, but he also said that science itself could be a religion, that a broad mind was always in danger of becoming narrow.”