“You there, you look like a well-rounded lady, oh yes, and I mean well-rounded”

“Oh, Professor Lyall, are you making a funny? It doesn’t suit you.” The sandy-haired Beta gave Lady Maccon a dour look. “I am exploring new personality avenues.” “Well, stop it.” “Yes, my lady.”

“If I express an interest in Giotto and yarn bombing, Bach and Lady Gaga, I am well-rounded. But if I read Thomas Mann and Harlequin…I must be slipping.”

“At an early age, you started hearing it: It's a virtue to be "well-rounded."... They might as well have said : Become as dull as you possibly can be.”

“Carstairs is alright, I suppose. If you like that sort.”“Oh?”“The taken. The uninterested.”“As opposed to… you, Gabriel?”“Well, yes.”

“Tell me," Wittgenstein's asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?”