“Mr. Segundus began to suspect that they had an uneventful morning, and that when a strange gentleman had walked into the room and dropt down in a swoon, they were rather pleased than otherwise.”

“Poor gentleman," said Mr Segundus. "Perhaps it is the age. It is not an age for magic or scholarship, is it sir? Tradesmen prosper, sailors, politicians, but not magicians. Our time is past.”

“They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.”

“She had been in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love, but rather doing something much more ordinary”

“Like the morning you walked out of that old house, when you were eighteen and I was, well, I had just turned nineteen, hadn't I? I was a nineteen-year-old and I was in love with Louis and I was in love with you, and I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful as the sight of you walking out a glass door in the early morning, still sleepy, in your underwear. Isn't it strange?”

“I took a look out the window before I left the room, though, to see how all the perverts were doing, but they all had their shades down. They were the heighth of modesty in the morning.”