“By a curious perversity, the human mind refuses to behave itself on the occasions when it should be intensely dramatic. It was so now; the climber suddenly forgot his fears in a smile. The choir had chosen this precise moment to start the Nunc Dimittis.”

“Margaret had always dreaded lest her courage should fail her in any emergency, and she should be proved to be, what she dreaded lest she was--a coward. But now, in this real great time of reasonable fear and nearness of terror, she forgot herself, and felt only an intense sympathy--intense to painfulness--in the interests of the moment.”

“Curiouser and curiouser!” Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).”

“But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.”

“Curiously, the darkness seemed to have something to do with Harriet, Ron's intended, and I thought for a time that it was simply the reality of Harriet's arrival that had dramatized the passing of time: we had been talking about it and now suddenly it was here — just as Brenda's departure would be here before we knew it.”

“Nunc fluens facit tempus,nunc stans facit aeternitatum.(The now that passes produces time, the now that remains produces eternity.)”