We’re all primitives underneath, that’s why we had to invent God, to be the voice of our conscience, or we would be killing each other left, right and centre.
We’re all Bolsheviks now, Izzie said blithely. And at my table! Hugh said and laughed.
We're just cogs in a machine really, aren't we? Miss Fawcett said to her and Ursula said, But remember, without the cog there is no machine.
War did indeed make strange bedfellows of people.
Viola hadn’t seen Sunny for nearly ten years and in the interim he had turned into a complete human being. (Perhaps the two things aren’t unrelated, Bertie said.)
This was love. It didn't come free, you paid in pain. Your own. But then nobody ever said love was easy. Well, they did, but they were idiots.
There were doorways between this world and the next, she said, but only certain people could pass through them.
The purpose of Art,’ his mother, Sylvie, said – instructed even – ‘is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself.
The plot thickens, he said, and wished he hadn’t said that because it sounded like something from a bad detective novel. I think we have a suspect. That didn’t sound much better. My house has just exp...
The mountain panorama was the backdrop to every photo taken here, the backdrop to everything. At first Ursula had thought it beautiful, now she was beginning to find its magnificence oppressive. The g...
The mind is a fathomless mystery.
The dead were legion and the gods had their own secret agenda.
The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.
The Knights’ Code, which he had learned by heart from Scouting for Boys, a book he frequently turned to in times of uncertainty, even now in his self-exile from the movement, demanded that Chivalry re...
That was the problem with time travel, of course (apart from the impossibility) - one would always be a Cassandra, spreading doom with one's foreknowledge of events
Sylvie's children really only came into focus for her when in isolation. Together, they were an unwieldy flock, singly they had character.
Sylvie was surprised by the rabid patriotism of the women on the platform, surely war should make pacifists of all women?
Stella was one of Mr Bullock’s ‘chorus girls’ and confessed (readily) to being a ‘striptease artiste’ but Mr Armitage the opera singer said, We’re all artistes here, darling.What a bloody fairy that m...
Sometimes it takes just one good man, Ursula said to him during the war. Neither of them could think of an example from history, except the Buddha perhaps, Ursula offered. I’m not convinced by the rea...
Some might count sheep. Teddy counted the towns and cities he had tried to destroy, that had tried to destroy him. Perhaps they had succeeded.