“The best thing about animals is they don't talk much”

“Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.”

“Even speech was for them was a debased form of silence; how much more futile is poetry which is a debased form of speech.”

“Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.”

“Simon Stimson: "...That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another.”

“Once you have swung a pickax that will reveal the curve of a street four thousand years covered over which was once an active, much-traveled highway, you are never quite the same again.”

“She did not suspect that the Abbess was even there hovering about the house, herself estimating the stresses and watching for the moment when a burden harms and not strengthens.”