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You don't win by hunkering down. You win by moving.

Silsbee had a way of blinking that showed a thought was passing through his mind. He said, 'My dog makes me happy.'

'That's exactly what I mean. Wgy isn't it doing something useful?' And in a kindly way Moses asked, 'What's the insufficiency inside you that is satisfied by a dog?'

There I was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupted nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic TV, with virtually no health services for the poor. Where to go? What to do?

I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that's going to happen to them.

All these days the buzzing gossip about Molly's meetings with Mr Preston, her clandestine correspondence, the secret interviews in lonely places, had been gathering strength and assuming the positive form of scandal.

[O]nce or twice I've thought I would marry Mr. Preston out of pure revenge, and have him for ever in my power—only I think I should have the worst of it; for he is cruel in his very soul—tigerish, with his beautiful striped skin and relentless heart. I have so begged and begged him to let me go without exposure.

He stood back, looking the place over for the tenth tome. All those girls' pictures that he'd taken down from the walls had left yellow stains behind them from being up so long. What did he want those counterfeits for, now that he'd found the real thing at last?

At first [Molly] made herself uncomfortable with questioning herself as to how far it was right to leave unnoticed the small domestic failings -- the webs, the distortions of truth which had prevailed in their household ever since her father's second marriage.

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough....

-- You know about the server?
-- The great mystery, yes. Assumed to be Chinese, and as with so many aspects of China today, quite beyond us. You use it to communicate with the past, or rather a past, dince in our actual past, you didn't.

H G Wells: I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling.

the knoll which was no abode of the dead because
there was no death, not Lion and not Sam: not held fast
in earth but free in earth and not in earth but of earth,
myriad yet undiflFused of every myriad part, leaf and twig
and partide, air and sun and rain and dew and night, acorn
Oak and leaf and acorn again, dark and dawn and dark and davra again in their immutahle progression and, being
myriad

Osborne now reproached himself with having done Mrs. Gibson injustice. She was evidently a weak, but probably a disinterested, woman; and it was only a little bit of ill-temper on her part which had caused her to speak to Roger as she had done.

Osborne was shut out by his fastidiousness and his (pseudo) genius.

Things never go the way you plan them, except in fantasies. The watery taste of disappointment was as familiar as a pair of old shoes.

Go back and then imagine the old highway -- this road I love -- as it was, as it now is, and as it will become. This crooked path littered with history, aspirations, broken promises, and fulfilled dreams has been shaped by its geography.

If you looked directly at a Gorgon, supposedly, you were turned to stone. I told that today to the kids around my swimming pool. They had never heard of a Gorgon. I don't think they've heard of anything that wasn't on TV less than a week ago.

"You are very kind, Miss Browning, but, you see, I hardly like to let them go—they are not out, you know, till after the Easter ball."

"Till when we are invisible," said Cynthia, always ready with her mockery to exaggerate any pretension of her mother's. "We are so high in rank that our sovereign must give us her sanction before we can play a round game at your house."

Mrs Gibson was dressed for receiving callers, and made the effect she always intebded to produce, of a very pretty woman, no longer in her first youth, but with such soft manners and such a caressing voice, that people forgot to wonder what her real age might be.

Indeed, if only brawls, uprisings and wars would end, Los Reyes [Lima] would be one of the finest places in the world in which to spend one's days. There is neither hunger, nor plague, nor rain, nor lightning, nor thunderbolt. The sky is always clear and very beautiful. More could be said, but I will pass on.

One of the Spaniards' main troubles was that the horses' shoes had worn out, and there was no iron. The historian Ovedo reports: They had shoes and nails for their horses made of silver by very good Indian smiths, who made as many as they wanted. These shoes lasted them for the next two months.

Plato tells many most remarkable details about the customs and riches of [Atlantis], in particular about a temple standing in the principal city, the walls of which were covered with plates of gold, silver and brass.

The man without a theory or a dogma is ship without sails or rudder. But he who has a theory or a belief has something wherewith to steer by and to sail close-hauled against the wind if need be. He can ride out the roughest of storms and stay clear of shoals.

Every young girl of seventeen or so, who is at all thoughtful, is very apt to make a Pope out of the first person who presents to her a new or larger system of duty than that by which she has been unconsciously guided hitherto.

She was afraid of saying anything, lest the passion of anger, dislike, indignation -- whatever it was that was boiling up i9n her breast -- should find vent in cries and screams, or worse, in raging words that could never be forgotten.

i had been misled, truth is square, heavy, thick, it does not admit distinctions, good is an idle dream, an intention constantly postponed and pursued with exhausting effort, a limit never reached, its reign is impossible.

For some weeks now I had been thinking that, in the overcrowded cities of Africa, I learned nothing except that people who had come to those places endured the dirt and discomfort because they were buoyed by their hopes of leaving and felt safer in the dense anonymity of a slum. A sense of temporariness made the squalor bearable.

I was sightseeing, an aimless, usually goofy activity I generally disparage for its self-indulgence, but the sights were beautiful, the food was excellent, the weather was perfect -- it was all so undemandingly pleasant there was nothing to write about; and I had the feeling that once I left, I would be on a bumpy road, headed through dust into uncertainty.

They lived in the house, and occupied an uncomfortable, ambiguous, or, as Miss Browning called it with some truth, "amphibious" position.

The dilemmas Seneca now faced -- ethical, political, and deeply personal -- would grow more complex and pressing through the decade he was to spend at Nero's side. To judge by the few oblique references to them, he was never to find resolution.