“The summer had been mad. It had been like a badger caught in a tarred barrel, fed on chilli an forced to listen to chanting monks.”

“The most puzzling thing in the entire encounter occurred at a certain stage very late in the conversation, when she discovered she had been talking to a man. She had the feeling of a dream where things and people transmogrify, characters dissolve from one to the other like tricks in a film, monsters in a bottle. She had the sense, the very distinct sense, of her companion's female gender; she had been pleased to find it, had relaxed into it, had been even more delighted to find it coupled with an elegant wit and a sense of both joy and irony. The forces of life, she thought to herself, are flying high tonight.”

“The Zodiac had rearranged itself into a precise grid of bright points with luminous tails. It was as though the whole planet had been caught in some great closing net, the knots of its mesh aglow with St. Elmo's fire. It was beautiful. It was terrifying.”

“He had been working at the wall for too long. Why he bothered the Lord only knew. After all, it went nowhere and closed in nothing. His grandfather had been a master waller in the dale, but the skill had not been passed down the generations. He supposed he liked is for the same reason he liked fishing: mindless relaxation. In an age of totalitarian utilitarianism, Gristhorpe thought, a man needs as much purposeless activity as he can find.”

“Just this past summer, I took online courses in introductory logic and law through civilization. Often the weight of history, with its facts heaped upon facts requiring complex chains of inference to sort through – I mean complex for someone with the soft brain of a tomato merchant; for me the premises are obvious and the conclusions dire and inescapable – threatened to crush me, and I was ultimately forced to abandon the whole undertaking. By way of recovery, I spent the rest of the summer immersed in a Freudian meditation on some choice tabloids. The mysterious lives of celebrities make for challenging induction. The reasoning process involves navigating many gaps in our knowledge of them. What is certain is that under the iceberg of glitz and glamor lie neurotic, depraved individuals with bizarre habits and hobbies, people who think they’re above the law.”

“That sea - that mother of a million summers,Who bore, with melody, a million springs,Shall sing for my enchantment...”

“Everything had to be in order for you, everything had to make sense. I hope you've learned that some things don't make sense, no matter how hard you try to make sense of them.”