“One evening, after he’d read a piece about yet another savagery in Bosnia, I saw there were tears in his eyes. ‘Don’t it ever stop?’ he said. ‘I can mind Father telling that there’d be no more wars, not after his one. It shames me. It shames all of us. What’s the good in reading, if that’s all there is to read about?”

“Oh, such a shame, such a shame. Oh, such a shame. What’s it all about anyhow?”“I’ve wondered for a long time.”“But why bring it to me?”“I guess I’m the Black Death,” he said slowly. “I don’t seem to bring people happiness any more.”

“It's a shame for a woman's history to be all about men-first boys, then other boys, then men, men, men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war after another, with the dull periods of peace skimmed over when they happened.”

“I didn’t worry about leaving Jay with Pagan this time. I was surehe’d get the message when he read his ticket.After all when a guy reads,She’s mine. That’s your one and only warning.Dank WalkerHe knows if he isn’t ready for a fight he can’t win then he’d better back the fuck off.”

“I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose.”

“So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks.”