“Although she didn't have the plumbing, she deluded herself that she was the modern W.C. (about Margaret Thatcher, M.T.)”

“We have seen these bodies, she would think, and even long after we are gone some particle in the universe will hold a memory of the words we once used to describe their beauty.”

“The rooms of his apartment were full with the dog home again, convalescing. He was satisfied to know, even when she was out of sight, that somewhere in the apartment she was sleeping or eating or sitting watchfully. It was family, he guessed, more or less. Did most people want a house of living things at night, to know that in the dark around them other warm bodies slept?Such a house could even be the whole world.”

“Beneath the violet pillar, in the vacuum before the roar of the cloud, there came a soft sound that might have been heard by those who listened closely: the gentle sigh of an idea unbound.”

“What place would that be, a whole world without roads? It was a panicking thought. A world without roads! He would go nowhere in such a place. He would be trapped where he was, he would have lived out his life only where he was born.”

“Then he would get into a plane and leave the field wide open; the field was crammed with paralegals, all of them stoutly armed with condoms.”

“There was the honour and austerity of money as he walked through art galleries, as he saw around him the collections of oil paintings by dead men, lit so carefully that warmth seemed to emanate from within - and not because their art was loved or understood but because it could be sold and bought for handsome sums.”