“Boredom had not been among the dangers that the SOE had prepared him for. No pompous little officer had stood in front of his class and said, "Right, chaps, today we're going to learn how to deal with a particularly nasty little situation that secret agents tend to find themselves in: being bored abso-bloody-lutely rigid".”

“It's not the scar and it's abso-freakin-lutely not you."I dropped my hand. "Yeah, right." I sagged against him a little. For being as little as he is, Frankie's really solid. "It's never me."I felt his sigh against my shoulder blades.”

“He was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and forgotten to say 'when'!”

“So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little. I had not intended to keep May Kasahara a secret from Kumiko. My relationship with her was not that big a deal, finally: whether I mentioned it or not was of no consequence. Once it had flown down a certain delicate channel, however, it had become cloaked in the opacity of secretiveness, whatever my original "intention" had have been.”

“Let's just say that our marriage preparation classes would have been far more helpful if they had covered topics such as "What to do when you husband lacks any vision whatsoever" or "How to cope when your wife wants to move the bloody front door".”

“I gave him a bored look. I had been threatened many times before and had learned that the men who didn’t make verbal threats were the most dangerous.”