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Seneca wrote much but made few clear mentions of his political career, and he played a role in politics that often ignored the principles of his writings. My goal has been to hold both the writer and the courtier in view at all times, despite their non-acknowledgmentn of each other.

Espinosa had been a policeman for almost as long as [fellow detective] Welber had been alive. He'd lost a lot of his old preconceived notions. He hadn't arrived at any visible truth and was constantly enlarging the part of his mind where he stored doubts.

If the Sufis brought many Hindus into the Islamic fold, then they also succeeded in bringing an awareness of Hinduism to India's Muslims. Many Sufis regarded the Hindu scriptures as divinely inspired, and took on the yogic practices of the Hindu sadhus: hanging themselves by the feet to recite prayers. sometimes using the hat racks or luggage rails of trains from which to hang.

I had seen the tiny, slender, barefoot figure of the nun in her white sari bounding up the steps above me as I began my ascent. She climbed quickly, with a pot of water made from a coconut shell in one hand, and a peacock fan in the other. As she climbed, she gently wped each step with the fan in order to make sure she didn't stand on, hurt or kill a single living creature on her ascent of the hill.

Oh, why is it that in this world there's always somebody we have to wish in Hades? It's not a matter of war or revenge or rivalry or just family against family, or tribe against tribe, or race against race. Those things are all part of the game, part of the way things are, part of the price we have to pay for being alive at all.

What we all want in our hearts, men and women alike, is a peaceful and at the same time an active life. There are too many prophets and oracles too, who always tell us to crown some king, to obey some law, to follow some hero, to embrace some system, to accept some philosophy, to invade some country, to sack some city!

Odysseus: I've made up my mind to hoist sail again before I die. I'm not going to rot here [in Ithaca] till I'm eaten by worms.

The patients Jonas had befriended looked for him on the bench over the next few days. Two weeks after his disappearance, they stopped asking about him. It didn't take long for them to forget their friend. Jonas was remembered only two months later, when the news arrived at the hospital that he had disappeared.

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies.

'Get out,' he said. 'Get out of this office and never show your face in here again. Because if you do, I'll see you're kicked off the force, kicked so hard you'll never know where you bounced. Now, go. Get out. Get out.'

The power of one person over another is ruinous in the first place to the person who exercises power. Wealth and money are just the same sort of power as direct power. They are likewise ruinous in the first place to those who possess it, and the more ruinous because their evil is concealed.

One of the most common delusions is to consider people good, evil, stupid or clever. Man is in a state of flux and contains within himself every potential: he was stupid and is now clever, he was evil and was now good, and vice versa. That is man's greatness. And for that reason one mustn't judge a man. What is he like? You judge him and he is already a different person.

Durand was looking for the first time at Walter Downs. Out of a hundred lives that cross a particular one, during its single span, ninety-nine leave no trace, beyond the momentary swirl of their passing. And yet a hundredth may come that will turn it aside, deflect it from its course, alter it so, like a powerful cross-current, that where it was going before and where it goes thereafter are no longer the same.

It's impossible to force the mind to understand and comprehend what the heart doesn't want.

You can see any number among the injured who have lost the use of their arms and legs. Even blind men and deaf mutes are not so extraordinary. But where have you ever seen a man without a face?

Martin Beck, the born detective and famous observer, constantly occupied making useless observations and storing them away for future use. Doesn't even have bats in his belfry -- they couldn't get in for all the crap in the way.

In her voice, Tom heard the bulwarks of castles, churches, the middle class. Grey and beige stones, impregnable. Decent behaviour.

A pair of flies, insane as usual, were annoying Tom. He pulled one out of his hair. They were zooming around his night table. Late for flies, and he'd had quite enough of them this summer. One fly jumped on the other's back. In plain view! Tom struck a match and held it to the bastards. Wings sizzled. Buzz-buzz. Legs struck in the air and flailed their last. Ah. Liebestod, united even in death!

As a general rule, I had noticed that archeologists were spectacularly good at picking arguments, perhaps because they spent so long looking down the same hole. The only profession I could think of that was remotely as cantankerous and bad-tempered were minicab drivers, who spend too much time on their own listening to reports on the radio about how other drivers are picking up fares.

I felt that seventeen explorers, eight muleteers, twelve horses and twenty-five mules were all turning their heads to look at me. I had failed the expedition and brought everyone to the middle of the Peruvian jungle on a wild-goose chase.

Lapointe didn't need to look at his chief to know where he had got to. Precisely nowhere. He had the heavy, stubborn look he wore in the doldrums of an investigation, when he didn't know how to proceed and was half-heartedly trying every angle.

Carol. He wondered just what he should do about her anyway. Or whether he should do anything about her. She looked completely virginal, and if she was, that was that. She'd remain that way, as far as he was concerned. But looks could be deceptive; and sometimes, when she consented to a kiss and she clung to him for a moment, well, he wasn't so sure about her status.

At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best thw white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.

[Rollo Greb] is a great scholar who goes reeling down the New York waterfront with original seventeenth-century music manuscripts under his arms, shouting. He crawls like a big spider through the streets. His excitement blew out of his eyes in stabs of fiendish light.

I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn burn burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

You can try not to be ruled by circumstances. To be a hardheaded strongman is as good an act as any other. It takes all kinds to make the world go round. You'll find out soon enough about recoils and backfires.

Life (I'm reflecting) is made of a thousand nothings. Some people are happy to settle for this.

A road generally knows what it's about. You just have to follow it.

He wondered whether he had ever really been in this apartment at night or whether it was just a bad dream, the kind that recurs regularly. Each time, as you're falling asleep, you're afraid you might have it again, and the dream is so insistent that all the next day you retain scraps of it, unable to disentangle day from night.