“All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.”

“What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea.”

“You don't often get a proposal to do Tolstoy for a really interesting director - that's easy to say yes to.”

“Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Val...”

“Poetry is what he turns to these days, finding in its fragmentation the proper echo of the disintegrating world.”

“If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me o...”

“What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?”

“...she says, Even when you think you can't bear it, you can bear it. He doesn't say anything. Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles, she says. Believe me. I have been w...”

“When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the ja...”