“But for all the feet that had trodden it, it remained ordinary dust, which seemed to make everything much sadder.”

“It seems to me that we do live in two worlds... there is this physical one, which is coherant, and there is the spiritual one, which to the average man with his flashes of religious experience, is very often incoherant. This experience of having two worlds to live in all the time, or not all the time, is a vital one, and is what living is like.”

“We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.”

“Perhaps the various burnings of the Alexandria Library were necessary, like those Australian Forest Fires without which the new seeds cannot burst their shells and make a young, healthy forest.”

“He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.”

“People don't help much.”

“The air was heavy with unspoken knowledge. Sam twisted and the obscene word shot out of him. "--dance?"Memory of the dance that none of them had attended shook all four boys convulsively.”