“Why Brownlee left, and where he went,Is a mystery even now.For if a man should have been contentIt was him; two acres of barley,One of potatoes, four bullocks,A milker, a slated farmhouse.He was last seen going out to ploughOn a March morning, bright and early.By noon Brownlee was famous;They had found all abandoned, withThe last rig unbroken, his pair of blackHorses, like man and wife,Shifting their weight from foot toFoot, and gazing into the future.”

“That was all he had ever aspired to, with a wife thrown into thebargain, maybe, and a kid or two to go along with her. It hadnever felt like too much to ask for, but after three years of strugglingto write his dissertation, Tom finally understood that hedidn't have it in him to finish. Or, if he did have it in him, hecouldn't persuade himself to believe in the value of doing itanymore.”

“Marx wrote about finance and industry all his life but he only knew two people connected with financial and industrial processes. One was his uncle in Holland, Lion Philips, a successful businessman who created what eventually became the vast Philips Electric Company. Uncle Philips' views on the whole capitalist process would have been well-informed and interesting, had Marx troubled to explore them. But he only once consulted him, on a technical matter of high finance, and though he visited Philips four times, these concerned purely personal mattes of family money. The other knowledgeable man was Engels himself. But Marx declined Engel's invitation to accompany him on a visit to a cotton mill, and so far as we know Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life.”

“I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.”

“I looked at Tarbox and saw he was a dangerous and ugly man. It was as if he had been born in someone's nightmare, then kicked his way out of their head.”

“He liked having the boy there beside him. Like some bright flame of life still burning bright beside the spent lamp of his own spirit.”

“We can’t all be Byronic adventurers like you Jude. Have you been wrestling with any brigands in the mountains there?” “No, but you’ve got to watch the drivers! Funny you should mention the poetic lord. He used to take his holidays down here, you know?” “What… picking up last-minute bargains with ‘EasyFrigate’?”