“He'd spent too long being disappointed by the world - he'd spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn't the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was.”

“Now, because we have spent so many years convincing the younger people that we are helpless, they believe that we are no longer of use to this world.”

“They too entered the world of dreams- that world in which a third of each man's life is spent, and which is thought by some pessimists to be a premonition of eternity.”

“He felt as if he'd woken up, weak and confused, only to be told that he'd spent the last three weeks in bed with a fever--and that during his illness, Queen Victoria had abdicated the throne and run off with a lion-tamer from Birmingham. The world seemed an entirely different place.”

“Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life.”

“The first week of school they spotted him using a tortoise-shell cigarette holder. When he'd overheard some of the boys whispering that he looked like a queer he'd gazed down his long nose at them and said he regarded that as a compliment since so many of the world's great men had been homosexual. Alas I've been sentenced to a life of mundane heterosexuality. I can only hope a few of you will be more fortunate.”