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Citizens, night has fallen. Worship Jupiter, the guardian of this city and of yourselves. Go home, and, although the danger [Catiline's conspiracy] has now been averted, defend your homes and guard them vigilantly, just as you did last night. I shall make sure that you do not have to do this for much longer, and that you can live in everlasting peace, citizens.

Do you not realize that your plans have been exposed? Do you not see that your conspiracy has been arrested and trapped, now that all these people know about it? Which of us do you think does not know what you were up to yesterday evening, what you were up to last night, where you were, whom you collected together, and what plan of action you have decided upon?

Members of the jury, I see that none of you is in any doubt that Gaius Verres has openly plundered everything in Sicily that is sacred or profane, public or private, and that he has engaged in every type of theft and robbery not merely without any compunction, but without even the slightest attempt at concealment.

Konrad was initially amused to learn that the meteorologist he went to see later that day was called Frosti. His amusement quickly faded, however, when he discovered that the young man in question was not only arrogant but astonishingly unfriendly.

You couldn't have asked for better weather. She was sitting with her tour group, admiring the view of the glacier and rummaging in her daypack for a sandwich, when her gaze happened to fall on a bump in the snow crust. It looked like a human face.

It would be in vain to deny that we feel a certain pounding of the heart, a blessed anxiety, the sacred nervousness that precedes final things. Soon we will run out of colours in the crucibles, and of brightness in the soul, both of which we require to lay down the highest notes, to sketch out the most luminous and transcendent outlines of this painting.

It is unforgivably reckless to send a young boy out on an urgent mission into such a night, for in its half-light the streets soon multiply, intertwine, and change places. The depths of the town open up to reveal double streets, doppelganger streets, false and misleading streets.

I would say that the best of us always comes out when we are against the wall, when we feel the sword dangling overhead. Personally I wouldn't have it any other way.

I have tried to teach you that the real experience is to be a man, and that what counts is being alive; life is the little detour that we are taking now. Life in itself is sufficient, self-explanatory, and complete.

One thing alone life does not appear to do; it never brings back the past. Unlike lifeless matter, it is historical. It seems to have had a single point of origin and to be traveling in a totally unique fashion in the time dimension.

We have heard that over in some of those European countries they have what they call the 'iron curtain.' We heard about a bamboo curtain in the last big war over in the East. Well, out here we have the buckskin curtain. The public just absolutely does not know and cannot imagine what goes on out on the reservations.

A lot of things are on this land that don't belong here. They're foreign objects like viruses or germs. Now, we may not recognize the fact when it happens, but a lot of the things that are going to happen in the future will really be the earth's attempt to throw off some of these sicknesses. This is really going to be like fever or like vomiting, what you might call physiological adjustment.

This is a political book; the sketch of a foreign country where I spent a day or so under two months; of a country which has already provoked a huge number of books, many of them by residents of life-long experience.

Is it the sight of death, the thought of dying? What sinks us to a deeper melancholy: sexual incompleteness or its spastic conclusion? What seems to line our life with satin? what brings the rouge to both our cheeks? Loneliness, emptiness, worthlessness, grief ... each is an absence in us.

So a writer writes in order to enjoy bread-and-butter and beer. He writes to keep the deadly enemy boredom at bay. He writes because at last it is the only thing he can do, and he can no more help doing it than a spider can help spinning a web.

The traffic [in Edinburgh] is frightening, to someone coming suddenly from Orkney. I would huddle among a flock of waiting people on the pavement, and then when I saw them beginning to surge across the street, I went with them like a sheep. Alone, I would have stood there till I was a statue.

Life being so brief, and beset with so many difficult and distasteful things, I intend while the breath is in me to eat and drink the things I enjoy. If you wasted time listening to experts, you'd soon wear yourself down to a gray worried wraith.

For the Orcadians, the winters of war were the worst. There was a strict blackout. Black drapes shrouded every window after sunset. One had to grope and guess one's way along the winter streets by night. Torches were allowed at last, but only a feeble pencil of light fell on the flagstones.

This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.

And the thing of course is this that to me my life is serious. It is just that, I don't know, the reality I inhabit is already slant. In the sense I think that Emily Dickinson meant by Tell it true but tell it slant.

When we had been in graduate school at Cambridge, for just one year, Maggie, a friend from college, announced that she was quitting, moving elsewhere, moving on. I asked why. After all, Maggie, I said, this is Harvard, Cambridge. It's been only a year, here we are, just two semesters. Why? 'Well,' she said, 'I've played this card now.'

Yes. Political activity does have certain specific characteristics. Politics is the art of washing things clean with very dirty water.

He just had to remember that stupidity was a consequence of powerlessness, and powerlessness derived from ignorance, from not knowing the true path.

'Massaraksh,' the cornet hissed, and started stuffing his pistol into its holster. It took him a long time to stuff it in, and then he simply couldn't button the holster.

I am reading a different translation of this book, entitled The Inhabited Island. Apparently, Prisoners of Power was heavily censored by the Soviet authorities.

'Where did King Charles's executioner dine, and what did he order?'
'I don't know.'
'Give in?'
'Yes.'
'Well he took a chop at the King's Head.'

It had come so softly towards us over the waters, this war; gradually, as clouds which quietly fill in a horizon from end to end. Only the rumour of it gripped the heart with conflicting hopes and fears.

A-bub-shush-o-lul-u-tut-e-lul-yum ("Absolutely" in the King Tut Alphabet used by the Carstairs children)

One of the reasons he agreed to track Captain McCrae was because once the job was finished he could go on and investigate the river country a little—he wanted a place where he would not be bothered by irritable Comanches.... He was hoping to find a place with a high mountain nearby.