“And now everything has changed once again. The air of the Close each evening is full of bird song - I've never really noticed it before. Full of birdsong and summer perfumes, full of strange glimpses and intimations just out of the corner of my eye, of longings and sadness and undefined hopes. It has a name, this sweet disturbance. Its name is Lamorna.”

“The third week of June, and there it is again: the same almost embarrassing familiar breath of sweetness that comes every year about this time. I catch it on the warm evening air as I walk past the well-ordered gardens in my quiet street, and for a moment I am a child again and everything before me - all of the frightening, half-understood promises of life.”

“Margrethe: And when all our eyes are closed, when even the ghosts have gone, what will be left of our beloved world? Our ruined and dishonoured and beloved world?”

“Early spring, yes. It's one of those cautiously hopeful days at the beginning of April, after the clocks have made their great leap forward but before the weather or the more suspicious trees have quite had the courage to follow them, and Kate and I are traveling north in a car crammed with food and books and old saucepans and spare pieces of furniture.”

“Two thousand million people in the world, and the one who has to decide their fate is is the only one who's always hidden from me.”

“Bohr: Heisenberg, I have to say - if people are to be measured strictly in terms of observable quantities...Heisenberg: Then we should need a strange new quantum ethics.”

“But that one single soul was emperor of the universe, no less than each of us.”