“The days of idealism had gone. Only life was left.”

“The parts of humanity that use to be civil are dead and gone. The only thing left is a technological, emotionless, colorless, dead version of reality we live in every day. ”

“It occurred to Mo that he didn't have any pictures of himself as a boy. Every photo he owned, every memento of his life, was from after. It was as if he had been born the day he left. He had gone out from here and invented himself.”

“Belief in an ideal dies hard. I had believed in an ideal for all the twenty-eight years of my life – the ideal of the British way of life.”

“He had undertaken a little assay at the good fight and found that neither the good nor the fight was left to him . . . he had gone after life again and they had shown him life and made him eat it.”

“Life had gone on. It always did. that's what you learned as you got older. Time. It kept moving. You wished you could change. They were gone. They left you in a snap.”