“Lets go to bed, honey, so these nice people can go home....”

“Either you choose to stay in the shallow end of the pool or you go out into the ocean.”

“It will be all right, Tom. Wherever we go now, whatever becomes of us, we'll be together, and it will all be all right.”

“You aren't a hero and I'm not beautiful and we probably won't live happily ever after " she said. "But we're alive and together and we're going to be all right.”

“It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.”

“Oenone had found the chapel by accident, and was not certain what kept drawing her back to it. She was not a Christian. Few people were anymore, except in Africa, and on certain islands of the outermost west. All she knew of Christians was that they worhsipped a god nailed to a cross, and what on earth was the use of a god who went around letting himself get nailed to things?”

“If only Myrtle would pay attention to the Boy's Own Journal, Blackwood's Magazine, etc., she would know that these creatures were Threls, who come from a worldlet called Threlfall on the far side of the asteroid belt. This Threlfall is a cheerless, chilly spot, and the whole history and religion of the Threls has been concerened with their quest to knit a nice woolly coverlet for it.”