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He called to mind the saying in Danil, "O ye wales all that move in the waters, bless ye the Lord. O all ye beasts and cattle, bless ye the Lord." And fearing lest the singing of the frogs might perchance be more agreeable to God than his own praying, he again issued his command to them, they they should praise God in their accustomed fashion: and soon the air and the fields were vehement with their conversation.

Vladimir began to thank his conational in his most weighty, elaborate Russian, but the Groundhog pulled them outside, where between clusters of tour buses and forlorn Polish-made taxis stood a caravan of BMWs, each sporting a yellow "PravaInvest" logo across the bow.

These are stories of the mutual charities between saints and beasts, from the end of the fourth to the end of the twelfth century. They are translated without sophistication from the original Latin, most of it of the same period....

You know, Vladimir, you and your grandmother are really all I have to live for in the world, well, as far as any man has to live for other people -- what is it they say? -- no man is an island. Your mother, nu, I picture she'll be here with me till the end. We are like one of those many unfortunate corporate mergers they've had in the past decade; we are like Yugoslavia.

Allergy to any definitive order, to any definitive power, is -- happily -- universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center were perfect embodiments, in their very twinness, of that definitive order.

The last few meters we traveled in a flash, as if we had no weight at all on our backs. It seemed as if we had never been welcomed with such friendliness, that we had never eaten bread and cheese like they sold us, or had such revitalizing mate.

The grander the larceny, the more eagerly the [Ottoman] authorities sought to negotiate. When pashas themselves stooped to criminality, it could not be long before criminals, in their turn, were being made pashas, and in the provinces by the end of the 18th century it was often unclear who was the bandit and who the governor, so complex and negotiable had Ottoman rule become.

"The Turks," wrote Busbecq, "have no hours to mark the time, just as they have no milestones to mark distances." Nobody thought to count the hours, or reckon the days, or to quail before any of the distances to be covered.... People lived, did and died: everyone knew that.

Suffering's face is abuser and abused.

Western camps were babels of disorder, drunkenness and debauchery. The Ottoman camp was a tea party disturbed by nothing louder than the sound of mallet on tent peg, the camels' cough, the bubbling of cauldrons filled with rice.

This book is about a people who do not exist. The word 'Ottoman' does not describe a place. Nobody nowadays speaks their language. Only a few professors can begin to understand their poetry -- 'We have no classics,' snapped a Turkish poet in 1964 at a poetry symposium in Sofia, when asked to acquaint the group with examples of classic Ottoman verse.

I have often dreamed of writing a book about Paris that would be like one of those long, aimless strolls on which you find none of the things you are looking for but many that you were not looking for.

They are not in the Room yet but they are realizing that one of mankind's deepest wishes is the need to complain, to moan, to be disappointed. Perhaps that's why gods were invented, so you could moan at them for the way things turned out....

What drove him on was the certainty that all this would soon be over. Then he could come and go as he pleased and there would be nobody to tell him what to do. Sometime in a distant future he would tell his grandchildren about it, and they would understand.

When he dipped into the mysteries of nature, he was sure that there must be a God. Who else could create such lovely works of art? Man's inventions could only ape those of his Creator. On the other hand, it was the same God who ensured that people died like flies, carried off by plague and war.

Terrible and somber, a steel-clad Russia had turned her face to the West.

[The] Greystocks were all people who wanted money. For them there was never more than ninepence in a shilling, if so much. They were a race who could not pay their way with moderate incomes. Even the dear dean, who really had a conscience about money, and who hardly ever left Bobsborough, could not be kept quite clear of debt, let her do what she would.

The next two months passed very pleasantly. As we were not impelled by ambition, envy, avarice or pride, none of us did anything at all: we remained sunk in greed, sloth and sensuality—the three most amiable vices in the catalogue....

[Stalin] suddenly remembered Trotsky's piercing eyes, their merciless intelligence, the contempt in the narrowed lids. For the first time he regretted that Trotsky was no longer alive; he would have liked him to know of this day.

What Liss found most terrifying about Hitler was that he seemed to be made up of an inconceivable fusion of opposites. He was the master of masters, he was the great mechanic, his mathematical cruelty was more refined than than that of all his closest lieutenants taken together. And at the same time, he was possessed by a dogmatic frenzy, a blindly fanatical fate, a bullish illogicality ....

My faith has been tempered in Hell. My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria; from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered.

Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone's right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No!

To the accompaniment of the sirens or the blows of a crowbar against a metal rail, prisoners set off to mine the potassium of Solikamsk, the copper of Ridder and the shores of Lake Balkash, the nickel and lead of Kolyma and the coal of Kuznetsk and Sakhalin. They set off to build a railway line along the shore of the Arctic Ocean, to clear roads through the tundra of Kolyma, to fell trees in the forests of Siberia...

They say that children are our own future, but how can one say that of of these children? They aren't going to become musicians, cobblers, or tailors. Last night I saw very clearly how this whole noisy world of bearded, anxious fathers and querulous grandmothers who bake honey-cakes and goose-necks—this whole world of marriage customs, proverbial sayings and Sabbaths will disappear for ever under the earth.

[Mrs Baines] was darkness when the night-light went out in a draught; she was the frozen blocks of earth he had seen one winter in a graveyard when someone said, "They need an electric drill"; she was the flowers gone bad and smelling in the little closet room at Penstanley.... You had to endure her when she was there and forget about her quickly when she was away, suppress the thought of her, ram it down deep.

It was nearly lunch-time before Blackie had finished and went in search of T. Chaos had advanced. The kitchen was a shambles of broken glass and china. The dining-room was stripped of parquet, the skirting was up, the door had been taken off its hinges, and the destroyers had moved up a floor.

She could see the urge in him struggling with his caution. Moving forward, she passed close to him and sat on the bed. She put her hands behind her and leant back. The blood slowly mounted to his face until it was congested. She saw his mouth twist and she dropped back, flat across the bed. He came toward her and reaching out, he gripped the neckband of her dress, savagely ripping the flimsy stuff from her.

That the Soviet regime was almost as unforgiving towards its own soldiers as towards the enemy is demonstrated by the total figure of 13,500 executions, both summary and judicial, during the battle of Stalingrad. This included all crimes classed by the commissars as 'extraordinar events', from retreating without orders to self-inflicted wounds, desertion, crossing over to the enemy and anti-Soviet activities.

The close-quarter combat in ruined buildings, bunkers, cellars and sewers was soon dubbed 'Rattenkrieg' by German soldiers. It possessed a savage intimacy which appalled their generals, who felt they were rapidly losing control over events.