“Our lives are businesses that are sometimes run by idiots.”

“My father was a Catholic, a coal miner in the Big Pit. My mother a Jew. A charwoman, when she could find the work. They didn’t fit in Wales. Nor in the U.K., either. They didn’t fit with each other all that well, for that matter. They fought every day for as long as I can remember and loved each other more than anyone I’ve ever known. At least they did right up till a night when he looked right and not left at a train crossing in Chepstow and ended up half a mile from where he’d started, dead as the Ghost. Looking for a job, he was. Turned out he didn’t need one.”

“We run down the right fork, Manchee at our heels, the night and a dusty road stretching out in front of us, an army and a disaster behind us, me and Viola, running side by side.”

“To deem us simply enemies is to lose the true flavor of our relationship. It was more like the two of us entered into a business partnership in order to more efficiently pursue our mutual interest of hating each other.”

“Touch and away, Jack?’ asked Stephen. ‘Touch and away? Do you not recall that I have important business there? Enquiries of the very first interest?’To do with our enterprise? To do with this voyage?’Perhaps not quite directly.”

“As exciting, difficult, and memorable as our past can be, there comes a time when we have to get on with living.”

“It is the business of a virtuous clergy to censure vice in every appearance of it.”