“He hovered, as it were, on the fringes of both the scientific and the classical worlds, making, apparently, no deep impression on either. Perhaps the characteristics that he inherited from D'Arcy the Elder partly accounted for this. Gifted, volatile, impulsive, and individual, neither could suffer a fool gladly, and they spoke their minds freely when occasion demanded and sometimes when it did not. They both went their own way; they would not ‘run with the pack’; they despised the instinct that leads men to say what others say because it is easier, or do as others do for fear of being thought different. Alike in demanding the highest standard of integrity in behaviour and work they spared no man who was slovenly in either; critical of their own achievements they were equally so of other men's.”

“They were not friends, Comdrade Pillai and Inspector Thomas Matthew, and they didn't trust each other. But they understood each other perfectly. They were both men whom childhood had abandoned without a trace. Men without curiosity. Without doubt. Both in their own way truly, terrifyingly, adult. They looked out into the world and never wondered how it worked, because they knew. They worked it. They were mechanics who serviced different parts of the same machine.”

“Interviewer: The other day, when we first talked, you said that you felt that, when you were writing, you were often following invisible patterns.Stone: I don't see them so much as hear them, and I know that a poem will happen and later I will look at it, and say: Wow, where did that come from? how did I do that? I didn't set out to do that, but the neural connections are so fast, the body, the self is so slow, (laughs) that you're kind of astonished. It's odd.”

“They all said that they could not do it either, but they did; that is what made them so great. They did not believe in their own worth either, not one of those men thought that he was the right man for the throne, but that was their greatness: that they did not believe themselves to be so high.”

“No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.”

“When you are able to maintain your own highest standards of integrity - regardless of what others may do - you are destined for greatness.”

“There was no mistaking the awesome implications of the chaplain’s revelation: it was either an insight of divine origin or a hallucination; he was either blessed or losing his mind. Both prospects filled him with equal fear and depression. It was neither déjà vu, presque vu nor jamais vu. It was possible that there were other vus of which he had never heard and that one of these other vus would explain succinctly the baffling phenomenon of which he had been both a witness and a part; it was even possible that none of what he thought had taken place, really had taken place, that he was dealing with an aberration of memory rather than of perception, that he never really had thought he had seen what he now thought he once did think he had seen, that his impression now that he once had thought so was merely the illusion of and illusion, and that he was only now imagining that he had ever once imagined seeing a naked man sitting in a tree at the cemetery.”