“They had a year of joy, twelve months of the strange heaven which the salmon know on beds of river shingle, under the gin-clear water. For twenty-four years they were guilty, but this first year was the only one which seemed like happiness. Looking back on it, when they were old, they did not remember that in this year it had ever rained or frozen. The four seasons were coloured like the edge of a rose petal for them.”

“A man obtains his God-the-Preceptor at the age of twelve years and four months. At the age of twenty four years and eight months he gets and sees Atma, God, in the seventh plane. It takes twelve years and four months in the body for God’s manifestations and realizations in multifarious conditions in the process of transformation of life-power into God.”

“Cortez looked like someone newly in love, the way only twenty-four-year-olds can look.”

“Twenty-four year olds were my new favourite thing. I needed to tell Oprah to put them on her list.”

“There are four seasons in a year: Winter, Spring, Summer and Colour!”

“Clairvoyant, Hornblower could foresee that in a year's time, the world would hardy remember the incident. In twenty years, it would be entirely forgotten. Yet those headless corpses up there in Muzillac; those shattered redcoats; those Frenchmen caught in the four-pounder's blast of canister -- they were as dead as if it had been a day in which history had been changed.”