“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.”

“...in home after home I have seen Jesus change beer into furniture, sinners into saints, hate-filled relations into loving ones, cowardice into courage, the fatigue of despair into the buoyancy of hope.”

“You mean old books?""Stories written before space travel but about space travel.""How could there have been stories about space travel before --""The writers," Pris said, "made it up.”

“Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.”

“The storm was really giving it everything it had. This was its big chance. It had spent years hanging around the provinces, putting in some useful work as a squall, building up experience, making contacts, occasionally leaping out on unsuspecting shepherds or blasting quite small oak trees. Now an opening in the weather had given it an opportunity to strut its hour, and it was building up its role in the hope of being spotted by one of the big climates.”

“I wouldn't wish now to digress into the philosophy of the relationship between life and logic ,but we shall agree that it was a good thing we were not wholly logical.For if we had been ,we would have surrendered at the end of April or the beginning of May 1992.The entire logic of the world was against us at that time.And now we have these illogical people who say: we have no food,we have no bullets ,but we'll fight and win.what is one to do with them? They are good,courageous people.”