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A bluebear has twenty-seven lives. I shall recount thirteen-and-a-half of them in this book but keep quiet about the rest. A bear must have his secrets, after all; they make him seem attractive and mysterious.
a good white lie is often considerably more exciting than the truth. Telling one is like dressing up reality in its Sunday best.
I had dispensed with a rudder on the principle that fate must be given a chance.
‘Anyone who can say “Ah” can learn to say “binomial coefficient” in no time at all!’
‘what do you now know about darkness?’ ‘Oh, it’s all quite simple once you rid yourself of the preconceived idea that darkness is merely the absence of light,’ I was astonished to hear myself say. ‘You have to learn to treat light and darkness as energy sources of equal status.’
Nabab showed me the only authentic way of preparing spaghetti (boil for twelve minutes, don’t rinse, simply remove from the hot water, allow it to drain, pour melted butter over it, fold in two raw egg yolks, squeeze a clove of garlic over it, mix well, and serve);
Wednesdays were the best thing about Atlantis. The middle of the week was a traditional holiday there. Everyone stopped work and celebrated the fact that half the week was over.
During my performance there appeared on his brow, barely discernible with the naked eye, a tiny bead of sweat. If there were weight categories for beads of sweat, this one would undoubtedly have been classed as a flyweight. It was smaller than a bisected speck of dust, smaller perhaps than a single molecule of water.
We entered a rectangular passage whose walls looked like shimmering metal but kept changing colour. But the genuinely alarming feature was that I’d never seen such colours before.
