“We Persians have a saying that one should deliberate serious matters first drunk, then sober.”

“Hephaistion had known for many ages that if a god should offer him one gift in all his lifetime, he would choose this. Joy hit him like a lightning-bolt.”

“You mustn't get so upset about what you feel, Spud. No one's a hundred per cent consistent all the time. We might like to be. We can plan our lives along certain lines. But you know, there's no future in screwing down all the pressure valves and smashing in the gauge. You can do it for a bit and then something goes. Sometimes it gets that the only thing is just to say, 'That's what I'd like to feel twenty-four hours a day; but, the hell with it, this is how I feel now.”

“One might have supposed that the true act of love was to lie together and talk.”

“In hatred is love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.”

“Don't talk so, Lysis. I'm sure you kept your head much better than I did." He smiled, and quoted a certain phrase, recalling a personal matter between us. Then he said, "Am I getting old, to find myself always thinking, 'Last year was better'?"-"Sometimes it seems to me, Lysis, that nothing has been the same since the Games."-"We think so, my dear, because that was our concern. If you asked that potter over there, or that old soldier, or Kallippides the actor, each would name his own Isthmia, I daresay... It has been a long war, Alexias. Twenty-four years now. Even Troy was only ten.”

“There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.”