“And indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system, so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely forgotten in the past.”

“Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.”

“The sixties - most of which took place in the seventies...”

“Most people gaze neither into the past nor the future; they explore neither truth nor lies. They gaze at the television.”

“A human life the treasure of the world cannot buy; nor can it redeem one which is misspent; nor can it make full and complete and beautiful a life which is dwarfed and warped and ugly.”

“Surely slavery was not tolerated in Kentucky, surely not in Lexington, which the captain so often called the Beautiful City. Everything would be different once they arrived in paradise. There'd be neither black nor white--there'd be people. Cynthia had been neither schooled nor conditioned for prejudice.”